Bug on a Wire
by jacobk
Summary: Taylor Hebert wanted to be a hero, but she never really planned out how she was going to get there. If she had been a little more proactive before putting on a costume things would have gone differently, that's for sure. Better? Well, that's a different question.
1. Chapter 1

AN1: Worm is awesome, and you should definitely start reading it before reading this. I say start reading because it's roughly 1.5 million words... you shouldn't need to be all caught up to enjoy this story.

AN2: I appreciate all constructive criticism, but for this chapter (and the fic as a whole) I'd particularly like to hear if the school stuff rings true. I'm more comfortable writing superhuman conflict stuff than high school drama.

This story is a little bit AU. Changes from canon:

- Taylor triggered one month earlier than in canon; the story begins one month before canon started.  
- As mentioned in the summary, Taylor is a smidge more proactive.  
- Shadow Stalker is not yet a Ward. This may not actually be AU, but I thought I should note it.

ooOoo

_I have tried in my way to be free._

ooOoo

Walking around Brockton Bay at night dressed all in black and staying out of sight, I'd seen a lot of things. Some of them I would rather forget, but some were pretty cool. The first time I saw a cape cut loose was definitely in the latter category.

I had read online that Shadow Stalker had the ability to convert her body into a "shadow state" that rendered her untouchable and unable to touch anything. The bolts from her crossbow while she was intangible would revert back to normal shortly after they were fired. It sounded like a pretty neat set of abilities, but I didn't realize how completely unfair it was until I saw a teenage girl beating the stuffing out of four grown men.

I guess everybody knows that real fights aren't like the choreographed shows you see in the movies. Still, on some level I expected to see something similar, if less graceful; Some kind of ebb and flow of attacks, counter-attacks, evasion, that kind of thing. There was none of that when Shadow Stalker fought.

It was actually very simple: whenever they tried to hit her she was in her shadow state, and they may as well have been trying to punch away fog. When she hit them, she was quite solid. When one of the men gave up trying to hit her and just tried to cover himself up, she started mixing it up a little. A punch that would have been blocked phased right through the man's face, lending momentum to a spin kick that knocked the breath out of him... and dropped him on the street once her leg shifted to intangibility and was no longer holding him up.

I felt a little sympathy for her targets. Just a little though, and it quickly went away. All four men were members of Empire Eighty-Eight, the white supremacist entry in Brockton Bay's assortment of street gangs, and before Shadow Stalker interrupted their night they had been hanging around on a street corner boasting to each other about their neo-Nazi bona fides.

She was taking her time with the last gang member left standing. He had also given up on trying to attack her, but rather than utilize her power to end the fight quickly she seemed content to slowly pick him apart. It looked like she was enjoying herself. In fact, it looked like she was so focused on what she was doing that she didn't notice when one of the other three stood up and moved to attack her from behind. The costume she was wearing looked like it offered some protection, but if she didn't know she was under attack she was as vulnerable as any non-cape vigilante.

Mister Sneaky was about to launch his ambush when his plans were rudely interrupted by a swarm of bugs. Mosquitos, houseflies, bees, some wasps-they didn't sting him, but they surrounded his head to the point that he couldn't see a thing. His cries of alarm alerted Shadow Stalker to his presence.

She finished off the fight she was focused on with some kind of complicated joint lock maneuver, then turned and, after eyeballing the distance for a second, took the last man standing back out of the fight with a roundhouse kick. I have to admit I was a little jealous. I was happy with the power that I had-controlling bugs comes in handy more often than you might think-but it didn't really lend itself to action girl heroics.

Shadow Stalker secured the downed men with some zip ties, then stalked out of the alley without a backwards glance. I had a whole speech planned for this situation, but something about the way she took everything in stride rubbed me the wrong way. Did she really think the bugs of Brockton Bay had just decided to help her out? I wound up calling out as she walked past the building I was leaning up against.

"You're welcome."

She stopped and turned to look at me, giving me my first close up view of her costume. She was apparently under the firm impression that black was the new black. Black pants, a black shirt, accented by pieces of black armor plating, all covered by a black robe and capped off with a flat black mask. None of her skin was exposed, and the overall effect made it difficult to read her body language, let alone her facial expression.

Of course, my costume wasn't particularly revealing either. I could picture in my mind what she was seeing. A mottled black and gray body suit, covered in strategic places with armor harvested from the hardier varieties of insects. A matching face mask with mandible-like armor placed to protect my jaw, a pair of yellow lenses covering my eyes. And, of course, the bugs.

I didn't have any illusions regarding my ability to take Shadow Stalker in a fight, so I was doing my best to make sure I could get away if the situation called for it. I had a decent sized swarm of insects crawling over my costume and flying around me, obscuring the shape of my body. If this turned hostile I would direct the bugs to block her vision and hoof it out of the area. In her shadow state the bugs wouldn't be able to harm her, but she still had to see just like anybody else.

"I had the situation under control," she finally responded. She sounded irritated, like my help was a hassle. I counted to three before I responded. All of my research suggested that Shadow Stalker was the rogue who would be most amenable to my plan, and I didn't need to get derailed into some kind of pissing contest.

"Cleaning up the streets," I said. It wasn't exactly how I'd written it down, but it was surprisingly hard to maintain my train of thought under that faceless glare. "That's why you do this, right, to get criminals off the streets, make things safe for the average citizen and all that?"

She just stared at me for another moment before turning and walking away. I bit back my instinctive need to call out right away; this wasn't going to work if it seemed like I was begging for her help. I let her take a good few steps away before I said anything.

"Kaiser will have their replacements out on the street by tomorrow afternoon."

Some villains went bad because of their powers, or because of the stress associated with their trigger event. Others were just evil bastards to begin with. There was no doubt where Kaiser stood. He had the distinction-if you could call it that-of being one of the top three contenders for the title of the most powerful white supremacist parahumans in the country. The other two worked for his gang. Hollywood attracted aspiring actors; Brockton Bay enjoyed a steady stream of aspiring skinheads.

"You think I don't know that!" Shadow Stalker snarled, spinning around to give me what I could only assume was an angry glare. "At least it won't be these particular assholes, and it might even fuck up Kaiser's day a little."

I was a little taken aback by her angry reaction. Sometimes people thought I was being sarcastic when I offered a sincere thank you; I was a little worried that I came across as being condescending when I was trying to be sympathetic. I mentally shook myself: there'd be time to work on my interpersonal skills later.

"How would you like to fuck up his day a lot?" I asked. She didn't answer, but she didn't move to leave, which I took as encouragement to continue. "Empire Eighty-Eight runs on two things: the parahuman power at the top, and money. Taking on their parahumans is a pretty tall order... but the money isn't so well protected."

"What are you saying?" Shadow Stalker asked, for the first time sounding a little curious instead of hostile.

"I know where Kaiser keeps his cash. His dealers are pretty careful about being followed, but nobody really notices an extra fly or two," I said, giving an unnecessary wave of my hand as I directed a couple of flies to do loop-de-loops. I didn't feel the need to mention the week of painstaking work re-tracing the path of the money every time it left the range of my communication with my bugs. "If somebody were to relieve him of that money, Empire Eighty-Eight might have a little trouble making payroll."

"You're talking about stealing," she replied, crossing her arms over her chest.

"The police call it asset forfeiture."

"The police get a warrant."

"I didn't figure you for the type to be a stickler about paperwork," I said. I hadn't expected to meet this much resistance, but I was starting to get a sense of how to get a reaction out of her. I shrugged, doing my best to keep any disappointment out of my posture. "If you're not up for it, I can handle the job myself."

I turned and walked away, keeping count in my head. One-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three...

"I didn't say I was out," she said, the words bringing a smile to my face. I turned around, thankful for the mask that hid my expression. "What's your plan?"

"I'll show you," I said, turning back and resuming my walk. When I reached the mouth of the alley I dispersed most of my swarm around the street and nearby buildings, allowing them to travel parallel to me without attracting quite so much attention. I kept a cadre of wasps perched on my costume in case I needed them for personal defense.

"I don't know you. You have the creepiest fucking power I've seen in person, and you think I'll just follow you around town?" Despite her hostile tone, Shadow Stalker matched my pace, staying a few strides behind me. She was tangible, for now, so the mosquito I had settled on her cloak gave me a good sense of where she was.

"It'll be a lot easier to explain when you can see the situation for yourself. Unless you have some kind of secret weakness to bugs," I said, not bothering to turn around, "you don't really have much to worry about."

She didn't reply but she didn't leave. I figured was about as much I was going to get when it came to Shadow Stalker conceding a point.

In some cities, two teenage girls walking around town in superhero costumes might be heading out to go clubbing, to see and be seen. In Brockton Bay, deep in the heart of Empire 88 territory, the two of us were doing a good job of staying unseen. Between the broken streetlights and the grey on black design of our outfits, we were little more than shadows passing in the night.

Not that there were many eyes around not to see us anyway. Tourists didn't frequent this area even during the daytime, and by midnight everybody who wasn't a member (or a customer) of Empire 88 was safely in bed. Shadow Stalker had cleared out a few blocks' worth of gang members, and criminals had a way of vacating the immediate area when capes started throwing their weight around.

Still, I made sure to double check with my swarm that nobody was watching us before I turned off into the alley way that was my destination. Shadow Stalker followed without comment, apparently satisfied that I wasn't leading her to such an isolated spot for nefarious purposes-or that she could handle herself if I were. We reached a fire escape that I had prepared by leaving the ladder extended to ground level, and I indicated that she should head up.

She pushed off the ground and transitioned into her shadow state, easily floating up to the first story landing before transitioning to solidity and repeating the process to bound up the stairs. I stifled a sigh as I took hold of the ladder and climbed up one rung at a time like a normal person. Shadow Stalker was waiting when I finished climbing the four stories to the roof. Her full face mask prevented me from seeing a smirk on her face, but I was pretty sure it was there.

I ignored her invitation to a game of parahuman one-upmanship and retrieved the duffel bag that I had stashed near the air conditioning unit in the middle of the roof.

"Take a look across the street," I said softly as I returned to where she was waiting. "Look for the house with two skinheads hanging out on the porch."

You could tell that she'd been doing this for a while. She dropped into a crawl well back from the edge of the roof, and covered the last few feet on her belly. She probably could have gotten away with turning cartwheels on the roof-it was a dark night, she was in dark clothing, and her opposition was a couple of bored gang members who were either bored out of their minds or high-but I was glad to be working with somebody who had good habits.

She walked back and gave me a nod. Her scouting trip had given me time to fish a notebook out of the bag and turn to the page that I wanted. I clicked on my penlight and held the notebook so she could read it.

"The house is two stories plus an attic. There are three guards inside here, here, and here," I said, relaying the information my bugs were giving me. "The two on the porch have shotguns, the men inside have pistols. No parahumans-Empire 88's capes think guard duty is beneath them. This is plan B."

I held out my hand and directed five black widow spiders to gather on my palm. Once I knew she had seen them, I had some of my flying insects come down to give them a ride across the street.

"No killing," Shadow Stalker kept her voice down, but it was clear that there was no room for debate.

"Relax," I said, part of my mind focused on directing the progress of my infiltration squad. "One bite is almost never fatal. But it does make for a heck of a distraction, and I'd rather have a distraction ready but not need it than the other way around."

"Fine, then. You're the bug girl," Shadow Stalker said, shrugging. "What's plan A, then?"

"You take out the guys inside while I handle the two on the porch," I replied. "You can just poof through the walls, right?"

"The walls, no. The windows, yes," she said, leaning over to take another look at my sketch of the floor plan. "It should be doable. Give me a few minutes to work my way around behind the target."

She didn't wait for a response before turning and leaping away. She transitioned into her shadow state once she was in the air, easily covering a good thirty feet before landing on the building next door. I added that little trick to the mental file I was building on my temporary partner along with her earlier vertical leap and her inability to walk through walls. The more accurate my idea of her abilities became, the more confidence I could have in my future plans.

I had a hard time keeping track of her movements with my swarm. When she went intangible the bugs sensed her as nothing more than a gentle breeze, essentially indistinguishable from any other random air current. She went tangible briefly as she touched down and prepared to jump to the next building; the bugs nearby were able to detect the displaced air, but there weren't enough bugs positioned around her next landing point to keep track of her moves after that. I gave up on trying to follow her entire path and set up some bugs on the inside of the buildings' windows to act as a sort of tripwire. I wouldn't have much warning before the fighting started.

I wasn't particularly concerned about our lack of coordination. While the country was still debating whether parahumans were the next stage in human evolution, dangerous sub-human mutants, or simply normal people with special powers, one thing wasn't up for debate: pretty much every documented parahuman out there had nothing to fear from a non-parahuman in a straight up fight.

I hadn't been lying before when I had told Shadow Stalker I was ready to take care of this job myself. Just gathering bugs as I walked through the neighborhood had put more than enough bugs at my disposal to take out five normal humans without even needing to put myself in harm's way. The purpose of recruiting her was to lay the groundwork for future cooperation and someday, maybe, friendship.

It was a pretty poor reflection on my social life that this was the most viable pathway I had for making a friend, but I already knew that my social life was pathetic from whatever angle you looked at it. I was never the kind of person who had a big circle of friends, so when my best friend decided to dedicate her life to making mine miserable as soon as we started high school, I was helpless to do anything about it. I needed a fresh start if I was going to meet anybody who didn't think of me as the school's punching bag, and if I could fight crime while getting that fresh start, so much the better.

I was pulled from my musings when the flies resting on a second floor window felt a breeze coming from the solid glass. Showtime.

I had been positioning a good portion of the non-flying bugs in my swarm on the roof above the porch where my targets were sitting. I directed those guys to crawl around so they were clinging to the ceiling immediately above the two men. I then had the ceiling squad drop down at the same time that a mass of fliers came swooping in from the street and another horde of ground bound bugs came swarming up the steps.

I don't think it's oversimplifying things too badly to say that there are two basic ways that people respond to being covered in bugs. The first is to start screaming and flailing around in an attempt to dislodge the offending insects. One of the thugs decided to go this route, and it was a fairly simple manner to direct the bugs crawling over his body into his mouth and cut off his ability to breathe. Once he passed out I had my swarm clear his airway, while sensory feedback from the bugs resting on his neck confirmed that he still had a pulse.

In the meantime, my other target had decided to go down path number two: he kept his mouth shut and tried to proactively deal with the situation, in his case by going for his shotgun and trying to see past the bugs to find their source. I had a few of my wasps sting his hand to keep him from getting a solid hold on his gun while some of the smaller bugs crawled up into his nose. Eventually he had to open his mouth to breath, at which point I dealt with him the same way that I had dealt with his partner.

I had the spiders in my swarm work to secure my marks while I made my way down the fire escape. The gang members had fallen kind of awkwardly, and even the mass of insects I had assembled wasn't physically strong enough to move a human body, so I couldn't exactly maneuver them into the classic handcuff type position. Still, with enough spiders working together I was able to produce a pretty solid coccoon of silk securing each individual hand to the porch railing. I wasn't sure that it would hold against a determined escape attempt, but I didn't expect either man to wake up any time soon, or to be particularly eager to fight when they did.

Shadow Stalker's head popped through the door while I was double-checking my spiders' work. She took a quick look around before drawing her head back through the door and opening it from the inside.

"All clear inside," she said. "Not quite as much cash as I was expecting, though."

I smiled to myself as entered the house. Her powers might look better in a fist fight, but having a swarm of insects at your beck and call is a pretty amazing tool for information gathering. I walked through the house like I lived there, even though I had never set foot inside. Making my way to the kitchen, I ignored the loose bills on the kitchen table and opened up the cupboard that in better days had probably been used to store cereal.

I wish that I could have seen the expression on Shadow Stalker's face as I pulled neatly-wrapped bundle after neatly-wrapped bundle of cash from the cupboard and stacked them on the counter. With the help of my bugs I was able to grab every bit of cash without needing to feel around in the dark.

I also pulled out several zip-loc bags full of white powder. I'm not the most street savvy kid at Winslow High, but I was pretty sure Empire Eighty-Eight wasn't stockpiling baking soda. I dropped the baggies in the sink, turned on the water and had my bugs chew through the plastic to let the drugs wash down the drain.

"Holy shit," Shadow Stalker said, almost sounding a little scared. "This isn't a stash house... this is the stash house."

"I told you, I followed the money," I replied, trying and probably failing to avoid sounding smug.

"You realize that if we take this, Kaiser will absolutely fucking murder us if he gets the chance."

"Anything we do that hurts the gang will piss Kaiser off. If we're worried about making him angry, what's the point of all this?"

"Hey, I didn't say we should leave the money," she said, raising her hands in a placating gesture. "I just want to make sure you understand what you're getting into."

"I didn't put on this outfit to play it safe," I said. At first I was a little surprised at the conviction in my voice, but then I was mad at myself for being surprised: the whole point of this new life was to leave behind all the limitations that bullying had placed on my old life. The last thing I wanted to do was start placating a new set of bullies. "I'm not going to let the fear of some jumped up racist prick dictate my actions."

Shadow Stalker didn't say anything, but I thought I detected approval in her stance as I transferred the money from the counter to my duffel. When I finished I handed her the bag. She took it, but cocked her head in a silent question.

"We don't have time to split the cash evenly tonight," I explained, "and I figure you'll have access to better hiding places than I do."

"You trust me with this, just like that?" She asked. She almost sounded angry that I would be so trusting.

"I trust that you know that if you decide to screw me over, I won't invite you along next time," I replied.

Her body language shifted at that. I might have been engaging in wishful thinking, but it seemed to me like she was smiling. I felt an answering smile appear on my face.

We made arrangements to meet the next day-well, later on the same day, technically-and split up to head home. The closer I got to my house, the less cheerful I felt. It wasn't that I had anything against my home or my dad, it was more that taking off my costume, changing into my civilian clothes, and slipping back into my bedroom emphasized what I already knew. With the evening's excitement over, I was facing a situation more intimidating than any number of Empire 88 thugs: I was going to have to go to school.

ooOoo

School didn't start out too badly. None of the girls who took a special interest in picking on me-Emma, Sophia, and Madison-were in Mrs. Knott's computer class, my first class of the day. The other students might join in once somebody started picking on me, and they certainly wouldn't step in to help me, but they generally wouldn't instigate anything on their own.

I was in the class's fast track, which added a little more space between me and the people who would look to improve their social status by having a go at me. Not that I was some kind of computer genius; any student who came into class with a computer at home and some basic computer literacy qualified. We were just now starting on Visual Basic after a year and a half of class. I managed to put together a program that generated a "hello world" dialog box in about fifteen minutes, which left the rest of the period free for a little web browsing.

My first stop was the Parahumans Online message board. I didn't see anything new about Shadow Stalker, anything that could be a description of me, or anything unusual about Empire 88. It was about what I had expected: a fight in a deserted neighborhood that didn't even have parahumans on both sides was hardly newsworthy. I hoped that we would damage the gang's operation, but it was unrealistic to expect much of an immediate effect. I saw it as something like gradually draining the oil from a car's engine. Eventually the whole thing might seize up and destroy itself, but it wasn't going to happen right away.

I closed out the message board before I could get suckered into reading one of the various cape versus cape debate threads, instead turning my attention to the parahumans wiki. I did a quick flip through the roster of known members of Empire 88; it remained daunting, but no new information had been posted since the last time I had visited. I put them aside as a problem for another day and pulled up the page for the Azn Bad Boys.

Despite their juvenile name the ABB was the second strongest criminal organization in the city, and they were making a serious effort to move to number one. Their leader was the primary reason for that. Lung regenerated from any injury that didn't kill him, but that was only the beginning of his power set. He also grew stronger the longer he fought, gaining physical strength, protective armor plating, even the ability to create and control fire. The more powerful his opponent, the more pronounced the effect became. There were rumors that he had fought an Endbringer to a draw by himself. I found those stories hard to believe, but there were confirmed reports of Lung taking on entire teams of capes and walking away none the worse for wear.

The other notable parahuman working for the gang was Oni Lee. He was a teleporter, but most of his wiki entry was occupied by a red box warning members of the public to stay away. He was described as an exceedingly violent psychopath who was quick to anger and should not be approached under any circumstances. The accompanying photo didn't do anything to contradict the description of a cold-blooded killer. His costume consisted of a black bodysuit with a black bandolier and belt that held an assortment of weapons. The only color on him was an ornate Japanese-style demon mask, crimson with two green stripes down either side. The whole thing gave off a sort of demon ninja vibe, adding weight to the notion that this was a guy who could and would slide a knife between your ribs given the opportunity.

Beyond the two parahumans, the ABB was estimated to have about forty or fifty thugs working across Brockton Bay, largely drawn from the ranks of Asian youth. Lung wasn't particular about nationality, enthusiastically-even forcibly-recruiting kids with roots in many different Asian countries. The ABB was pretty unusual in its pan-Asian approach, and it was a testament to Lung's strength that he was able to hold such a diverse group together.

I kept the ABB page up while I turned my focus to what I might do if I came face to face with Lung or Oni Lee. I had the same basic problem to overcome in either situation: my power didn't do anything to make me stronger or tougher. I had done my best to protect myself with my costume-I knew it would protect me from knife attacks, and I hoped it was at least bullet-resistant-but there was only so much that a bodysuit could do.

Letting either of them see me while we were fighting seemed like a quick way to die. Oni Lee would just teleport behind me and put a bullet in the back of my head. Lung, on the other hand, could reach a state where he would be essentially immune to attack from insects, so his only dilemma would be whether to finish me off with fire or blunt force trauma. If I was going to have any chance to take them down I would have to hit hard and fast while keeping them from finding me.

Thinking that way made me ask myself just how far I was willing to go. When I was just starting to get a handle on my ability, my first thought for a potential combat application had been to use the stings and bites of venemous insects. It was still the most efficient approach I had come up with in terms of doing the most damage with the fewest bugs. The problem was that the line between an incapacitating dose and a lethal dose of venom could get pretty fuzzy.

I hadn't been lying to Shadow Stalker: a single bite from a black widow would almost never kill. The problem was that a determined opponent would be able to keep fighting after that bite. That was fine if we just needed a distraction to allow her to finish somebody off, but if I wanted to take them out of the fight myself I would have to direct the spider to bite a second or third time. At that point death started to become a real possibility.

It wouldn't be an issue with somebody like Lung, as his regeneration drastically reduced the effect any foreign substances had on his body; as far as I knew, he couldn't even really get drunk. But for Oni Lee, the more human of the Empire 88 heavy hitters, and the rank and file of both gangs, poison was the fastest way to take them down but carried with it the unavoidable risk of death.

I wasn't entirely comfortable with the idea of killing even a hardened criminal. Beyond that, there were practical issues to consider. The Protectorate-the organization that employed most of the parahumans who worked in law enforcement-tended to treat parahuman criminals with kid gloves. Underage offenders in particular usually received probation or sentences of time served. There were even rumors that some of the currently serving Wards-the heroes-in-training that made up the under-18 wing of the Protectorate-had started out as minor villains. This leniency filtered down to the street level cape fights, which tended to be a lot less lethal than you might expect when you consider some of the abilities at play.

All of that changed if you started killing people. The Slaughterhouse Nine were a good example of what happened once the heroes took off the kid gloves. At any given moment the Nine were some of the most powerful villains around, and they got a kick out of using their powers in the most depraved ways they could think of. Despite that, the average member of their team lived for about seven months after joining. They only survived as a cohesive unit because their leader had the devil's own luck, paired with some kind of unholy charisma that kept drawing new psychopaths into his orbit.

I couldn't kid myself that I was even in the same neighborhood as Jack Slash when it came to being hard to kill, so I wanted to avoid doing anything that could possibly draw a kill order from the Protectorate.

I was drawn from my dark train of thought when the bell rang. Time for Mr. Gladly's World History class, which sent me down an entirely different dark train of thought.

Mr. Gladly was my least favorite teacher. He probably would have been surprised to discover that he was anybody's least favorite teacher. He always insisted that we call him by his first name, he usually ended class a few minutes early, and almost all of his classes involved group projects that were thinly disguised excuses to socialize. I wasn't sure if he just desperately wanted to be liked, or if he was just too lazy to prepare a lecture every day.

The popular kids probably did like him: they got to spend his class hanging out with their friends. For someone like me who didn't have any friends, it was a much less positive experience. His class didn't create the pecking order that had me placed firmly at the bottom, but it exposed it, and I couldn't help but hate him a little for that.

I got to his classroom without incident, and I was able to secure my customary seat up front by the door. Sitting near the front of the class provided a bit of a deterrent against any sort of in class "pranks," and being by the door let me beat the rush and avoid any of the casual cruelties that could be inflicted in the middle of a crowd. Things started looking even better when Mr. Gladly revealed that we would be watching a documentary on the end of the Cold War for today's class.

I was always glad for a break from group work, and it was especially welcome news after a night like last night. I watched the first few minutes of the movie to make sure I wasn't missing anything-seeing Volkshammer take his oversized mallet to the Berlin Wall was pretty neat, but they weren't telling us anything that wasn't in the text book-I tucked my head down on my arms for a quick nap. Usually I try to be a good student, but if Mr. Gladly was going to mail in a class session I figured I was entitled to mail in my attendance. Besides, I was still running off of about three hours of sleep after the time it took to take down the Empire 88 house, get home, and wait for my nerves to calm down.

The class passed without incident, and I woke up when Mr. Gladly turned the overhead lights back on. I gathered my things and was the first out the door when he dismissed us, and as I walked down the hall it only bothered me a little bit that I considered it a "good day" when I could get through two classes without being picked on.

Any chance that this might be a "great day" went away when I was shoved hard enough to send me tumbling down the last few steps on the way to the cafeteria. I had been lost in thought debating potential cape names-it was hard to come up with anything bug related that wasn't creepy or taken-and missed the approach of Sophia Hess. While I was down on my hands and knees, doing a quick inventory to make sure I had suffered nothing worse than some bruising, my concentration was broken by the shock of cold liquid pouring down the back of my neck. I looked up just in time to catch the last few drops of Coca Cola on my glasses as Emma finished emptying a can of soda on me.

"Oops, Taylor, didn't see you there. Sorry about that," Emma said, her voice too sickly sweet to be sincere. Then she started giggling. Sophia didn't join in-she wasn't the type of girl who giggled-but she did crack a grin at my discomfort. I didn't say anything, just staring at the two of them.

I could kill them.

The thought came from some dark part of me that was still riding high from the violence of the previous night. I had access to a couple thousand bugs in the immediate vicinity, and ten times that number were scattered throughout the school. Not the kind of numbers I would want for a serious fight with a parahuman, but more than enough to take down two high school girls. All I had to do was give the order.

I took a deep breath and pushed away the bugs that had started crawling out of the walls, and with them the crazy desire to lash out. Aside from the immediate legal consequences of that kind of action, I was better than that. I wanted to be a hero, not to start abusing others the way I had been abused just because I had some power.

I still felt a strong urge to punch them in the face, but I pushed that down with the ease of long practice. Emma was the golden child of the school; if she told the office that she had accidentally provoked me and I had overreacted, the school would come down hard on the dangerous loner. Sophia... well, I was pretty sure that no matter how much righteous anger I was bringing to bear, Sophia would lay me out in about ten seconds flat if I tried to start a real fight.

The only thing I could do was gather myself, stand up, and walk to the nearest bathroom with Emma's laughter ringing in my ears. I was able to rinse most of the Coke out of my hair, but my shirt was a lost cause. I had tucked a sweater in my backpack in case the weather turned cold before it was time to walk home, so it looked like I would be sweating my way through our afternoon classes.

When I had tidied myself up as much as I could, I took a deep breath and stared at myself in the mirror. Technically speaking, I didn't have to put up with this. Everybody knew that the Wards went to Arcadia High, the best high school in Brockton Bay. My power might not be so glamorous as to earn me endorsement deals like Glory Girl had, but it was useful enough that I was pretty sure the Wards would take me on. But then what?

If I was a loser at Winslow High, why would Arcadia be any different? The average student there was, if anything, richer, better connected, and better looking than the average student at Winslow. Sure, I wouldn't have anybody specifically gunning for me, at least at first., but I would still be at the very bottom of the social ladder. And then there was the whole issue of getting along with the Wards themselves. I was honest enough with myself to know that a guy like Gallant, for example, was never going to be caught dead hanging out with a girl like me. They wouldn't be able to vote me off the team, but I didn't really want to spend a lot of time with teenagers who were being forced to put up with me.

The other scary thing about joining the Wards was that there would be no going back. They would take down my name and my power and put them in some government database. They would insist that my father be informed. Right now, nobody had any idea that there was a connection between Taylor Hebert and some bug-controlling vigilante, and I liked it that way. The idea of breaking down the wall between my normal life and my life in costume was something I wanted to put off as long as possible.

Besides, it wasn't like I wasn't meeting new people, I told myself as I straightened my shoulders and prepared to face the school once more. Usually Emma backed off once she had gotten in her daily dose of making my life miserable, so the rest of the day should only get better. In the evening I would be meeting up with Shadow Stalker. I hadn't had a chance to show off my lair to anybody else yet, and I was really looking forward to it.

ooOoo


	2. Chapter 2

AN: As always, all comments appreciated. I like hearing what worked for you, what didn't, and why.

ooOoo

Calling it a lair might have been a little self-aggrandizing. I had realized pretty early on that the ability to control bugs was a lot more useful when you had more bugs around. It didn't take a Thinker to figure that much out.

For the most part, Brockton Bay provided a pretty steady supply of insects. Even the nicer neighborhoods had a surprising number of creepy crawlies hiding out of sight. If I just needed a few thousand bugs to swarm some gang members, there was no need to do anything but wander around town. The problem came if I wanted to be a little more selective.

The most obvious area where it helped was in selecting bugs for combat effectiveness-plenty of spots in town didn't have a convenient wasp nest or bee hive in range. Even within the same species there could be a major gaps in quality; all else being equal I'd rather have access to as many strong, healthy specimens of insect-hood as I could.

Since I didn't want to rely only on the bounty that Brockton Bay could provide, I had needed to breed them myself. My first efforts had been focused in our basement, but while my dad didn't go down there very often, it wasn't like I could lock him out. I didn't want him to head down there looking for a fusebox or something and walk into a set from a low budget horror movie.

I had found a solution in one of Brockton Bay's many abandoned buildings. A former toy store, it was located near the border of the downtown area and the Docks, a comfortable jog from my house. The buildings in the neighborhood had been rebuilt as part of an urban renewal project, converted into "picturesque" two story retail stores with apartments over the retail space intended for use by the store owners. Unfortunately, as the tough times in the city continued there was never enough retail traffic to justify keeping the stores open, and most of them were ultimately left for use by vagrants.

Once my breeding program started to hit its stride, the vagrants decided to seek shelter elsewhere. I had never bothered getting a lock for the door, since the first floor was pretty much impenetrable to anybody who wasn't with me, unless they brought an exterminator with them or something.

The first floor was basically a free for all. I only really intervened to encourage faster breeding cycles, and to provide some protein either in the form of mosquitos I had gathered in the neighborhood or some raw meat from the supermarket. Right now the bulk of the bodyweight was in your classic vermin species-cockroaches, centipedes, silverfish, millipedes and the like. There was a healthy population of spiders that fed on the vermin, and wasps that used the spiders as part of their reproductive cycle.

I kept some terrariums set aside behind what used to be the checkout counter to house the more dangerous spiders. I needed plenty of black widows to generate the silk I used for my costume, but they were too territorial to leave out on their own. I also didn't want to inadvertently unleash an infestation on the neighborhood if they managed to escape while I was gone. I had installed some screens in the broken windows to keep the bulk of the insects inside, but I figured it was better to be safe than sorry.

The bugs parted at my command as I stepped inside, and I picked my way through the abandoned shelves to the stairway at the back of the store. The second floor was where I had my "office" in what used to be the bedroom of the apartment. I had found a battered but serviceable writing desk in the toy store that I kept near the window overlooking the street. The building didn't have electricity, but between the moonlight and a little LED lantern I had picked up at the hardware store there was plenty of light to read by.

The rest of the room, along with the living room, was occupied by wasp's nests. It was a real hassle to engage in any kind of breeding program with social wasps, seeing as they usually only reproduced once a year. I did what I could, but I could only speed up the process by so much. For the moment I mostly contented myself with quantity over quality.

I was reviewing my notes on the ABB when my wasps noticed an unnatural puff of air in the still room. I looked up to see that Shadow Stalker had let herself in and was looking around the room appraisingly. She had her crossbow slung over one shoulder and was holding a duffel bag in her other hand.

"Nice place," she finally said. "It's very... you."

"Thanks," I said, not really sure how to reply.

"This is yours," she said, indicating the bag. "One hundred and eighty thousand, more or less."

I tried to act as nonchalant as she was as I stood up and took the bag, glad that my mask hid my expression. Intellectually I had known that a gang controlling over half the city's drug trade made a lot of money, but it was still a little shocking to hear the actual number. I managed to keep my composure enough to hand over the notebook as I took the bag from her hand. She glanced down at it, then looked back at me.

"The ABB stash house," she said. "You want to hit them tonight?"

I nodded before setting the duffel bag on my desk and opening it up. A stream of wasps flew inside at my direction before I rezipped the bag. It wasn't a permanent solution, but I felt better having at some security in position for that much money.

"Ok, what's your deal?" Shadow Stalker asked me. I looked at her curiously, unsure what she meant, and she continued. "If this was about money, well, you've got more than you could possibly need right there. Why keep going? It's going to piss off a whole new group of people. What do you want?"

I looked at her for a long moment, gathering my thoughts before I replied. I thought about the abandoned warehouses I passed every time I jogged through the docks. The kids at my high school already being pressured to join the ABB. The abandoned ferry terminal that my dad had been trying for years to get reopened. Though I had never thought about it quite the way she was asking, I found an answer that came readily to mind.

"I want this city to be better than it is. I want it to be what it should be," I told her. "For that to happen, the gangs have to go."

"Just like that?" She sounded a little skeptical.

"It's a long term project," I admitted. "But if we never get started, we'll never make any progress."

"Ok," she said, turning as though to jump out the window.

"Just like that?" I asked, echoing her earlier question.

"Hey, I don't really need a reason to lay a beating on those assholes," she said, her tone reflecting a smile that I couldn't see behind her mask. "I'll meet you at the lookout spot you marked out on the map."

With that, she was out through the window and gone. I reached out to my swarm and picked out the insects I thought I would need before heading out to our rendevous point.

ooOoo

The ABB kept their money in a warehouse in the Docks that also served as their drug processing facility. Relatively pure product came in one end, went through an assembly line process, and turned into the mix of drugs and filler that ABB underlings peddled on the street. Empire 88 kept its drug packaging and storage separate, either because it was somehow more efficient or to protect against discovery.

I had learned over the last few weeks that drug processing was a nine to five kind of business. It was weird to think of life in a gang as being like a normal job, but I guess when you're dealing with an assembly line it doesn't make much difference whether the end result is bottles of aspirin or baggies of cocaine.

By the time Shadow Stalker and I were on the right block the day shift was long gone. We paused long enough for me to confirm that there were eight men inside in addition to the two posted outside, and to tag each of them with one of the black widows I had brought along.

She was happy to go in with the same plan we had used the previous night. I thought she was being a little bit cavalier about the additional guards, but she was the more experienced of the two of us, so I didn't argue. Besides, if she was wrong she was only putting herself at risk-though I did wonder about the effect being essentially immune to attack had on one's psyche.

While I waited for her to kick things off I positioned my swarm as close to the guards as I could without being spotted. I had supplemented the bugs I had brought with me with some additional bugs from the neighborhood around us. This would be my first chance to really test out my personally-bred bugs in the field, and I was curious to see how they would compare. I didn't have to wait long for the opportunity as I felt some of the insects in the warehouse move in the pattern that I was coming to realize was characteristic of bugs resting on somebody who had just been sucker punched by Shadow Stalker.

Taking that as my cue, I sent a tide of bugs in to overwhelm the guards outside. One of them managed to get a couple of shots off before he was too busy trying to clear his airways to worry about anything else. I was pleased to note that my bugs were moving a little faster than the local talent. It wasn't like I was outsmarting millions of years of evolution. In nature, it was good to be faster and stronger, but it was also important to make good use of calories; by providing a practically unlimited food supply, I had removed the advantage that some bugs might otherwise have enjoyed by dint of efficiency.

The guards probably didn't appreciate the fine points of cockroach breeding, but the end result had them both safely unconscious soon after the "fight" had started. My first indication that anything was wrong was when one of the spiders I had inside shifted from one side of the warehouse to the other without crossing the intervening space. The second indication that we had a problem was the explosion.

The first explosion blew out the windows in the warehouse. The spider blinked around the interior one, two, three more times, and a trio of blasts followed that merged together into a single continuous roar. Once I had shaken off the shock it didn't take long to figure out what was going on: Oni Lee had taken a shift of guard duty.

He was bouncing around the warehouse too quickly for Shadow Stalker to deal with, somehow leaving explosives behind every time he teleported. Unless she got in a lucky shot with her crossbow, there was really nothing she could do about the situation. I didn't know how long she could maintain her shadow state, or whether it was providing her with any protection: I knew she was bullet proof, but I didn't know if that immunity extended to explosives.

It's funny, after all the agonizing I had gone through over the use of lethal force, making the decision took no time at all. Once I realized my partner was in real danger, I sent the order to bite.

Bite and move. Bite and move. There's usually a little bit of a delay between the time somebody gets bitten by a spider and when they notice it, and I wanted my minion out of the way by the time Lee slapped at it.

After the third bite, he teleported to within about twenty feet of my hiding spot. I tried to suppress my panic and had the spider bite again, this time forcing it to inject an extra dose of venom. A second later the spider blinked away and reappeared a block down the street. A second after that it vanished and didn't reappear within my range, and I heaved a sigh of relief.

I sent my swarm inside before I moved out of the doorway I had tucked myself into. The guards outside were secured, and I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to be coming face to face with Lung before I exposed myself. Only one of the guards inside was still moving-if the cascade of explosions had been rough on Shadow Stalker, it must have been hell on the unpowered guards-and my swarm quickly had him subdued. By the time I opened the door and walked inside, Shadow Stalker was seated at a table near what I assumed was a break area. She didn't look up at my approach.

"Oni Lee..." She said as I drew near, her voice trailing away somewhere halfway between a statement and a question.

"He's gone."

Her shoulders slumped as some tension that I hadn't realized was present seemed to drain out of her. Following her gaze, I was surprised to see that the hand she was resting on the table was trembling slightly. I didn't really know what to say, so I busied myself collecting the stored cash and disposing of the drugs on hand.

"When he teleports, he leaves a copy of himself behind for a few seconds. You can't even tell when he does it," she said after a few minutes, her voice sounding strange without her usual brash self-assurance. "It copies his knives, his guns... his grenades."

My eyes widened behind my mask at the implication. That series of explosions hadn't been some carefully crafted trap. Lee could just turn himself into an army of suicide bombers any time he felt like it.

"Are you.." I started to ask.

"I'm mostly protected from stuff like that," she said. "Mostly. But hitting him with the crossbow didn't do much when he was planning on blowing himself up anyway, you know. So I was a little bit stuck. An ability like mine, I guess I'm not used to feeling trapped."

I walked over and took her hand, giving what I hoped was a reassuring squeeze. I'm not really a people person, but even I could tell some positive human contact was called for in this situation. She accepted the gesture, but after a moment passed she shoved my hand away.

"Ok, ok, that's enough touchy feely stuff," she said, starting to sound more like her normal self. "You got the cash, right? We should get out of here before-"

As though summoned by her words, the distinctive sound of a motorcycle engine echoed through the neighborhood and carried in through the broken windows.

"Shit, Armsmaster."

She didn't say his name the way the kids at school would when they talked about capes. It sounded more like the way my dad would say the mayor's name after a frustrating day of negotiations. Like he wasn't some distant celebrity, but an actual person who was kind of a hassle to deal with. That was when it really hit me: Shadow Stalker was part of the club; she was a cape, not a civilian. And she thought I was part of the club, too.

"Problem?" I asked, equal parts worried and curious. I had never dealt with any members of the Protectorate in a professional capacity, so I really had no idea how things were going to go. I assumed they would take a dim view of theft, even from criminals like the ABB.

"He's twenty pounds of asshole in a ten pound suit," she said, standing up. I blinked, a little taken aback by the imagery. "I'll go see if I can get him to fuck off. If things go bad you should be able to slip out the back. He's here to investigate, they probably don't have the place surrounded."

With that she headed for the front door. It was fascinating to watch as she took a step, then another step, and then a switch flipped and she was moving with the confident swagger that I was starting to realize was as much a part of her costume as the urban camouflage cloak.

I moved to stay out of sight from the outside while still positioning myself to hear what was going on. Not for the first time, I wished that I could hear through my swarm. I could access the bugs' senses at will, but they were not wired anything like human eyes or ears. Trying to parse out what they were sensing gave me a splitting headache, and my initial inability to block out their senses had kept me confined to a hospital bed when I had first triggered.

"You know, it would have been nice if you had showed up while Oni Lee was still here," Shadow Stalker called out. "You and Kid... Kid whatever his name is."

"It's Kid Win, you know perfectly well-" The voice came from somebody who sounded like he was around my age, and a little irritated. He cut himself short, presumably at the direction of Armsmaster. I appreciated that Shadow Stalker had found a way to let me know that there were two heroes waiting outside.

"Shadow Stalker. I should have known it was you," Armsmaster said. He had a commanding voice. He spoke with the confidence of somebody who had been a hero for a long time, somebody who was used to being in charge. "This level of collateral damage is unacceptable."

"Lee's the one who decided to bring a grenade to a crossbow fight."

She sounded completely unrepentant. I don't think I could have brought myself to talk back to Armsmaster that way, but I could understand what she was thinking. Acting like she had something to apologize for would just make him suspicious.

"We don't like for Wards to get into such dangerous situations," Armsmaster said. If I had doubted that there was some history between those two, his disapproving tone would have dispelled it.

"It's a good thing I'm not part of the Wards then, isn't it?" Shadow Stalker replied.

"Where do you think you're going?" Armsmaster asked sharply.

I chewed on my lip as I reviewed what I knew about the heroes outside. It didn't sound like things were going to be resolved amicably.

Armsmaster was the head of the local Protectorate. His main weapon was his halberd, which could cut through steel, act as a grappling hook, or produce a plasma jet to burn through anything it couldn't cut. My costume wouldn't offer any protection against it, although he obviously wasn't the kind of guy who looked to carve up teenagers if he could help it. His armor incorporated some kind of technology, but didn't cover his whole body. Worst come to worst, I was pretty sure he had some exposed skin that I could sting.

I didn't remember reading anything about his parahuman abilities. Given that he relied so heavily on his gear, I assumed he was some kind of tinker. The most dangerous thing about tinkers was usually their versatility-you never knew what kind of sci fi gadgetry they would break out for any given encounter.

Kid Win was another tinker. A relatively junior member of the Wards, his trademark gear was his hoverboard and an array of ray guns. Again, I couldn't assume that my costume would provide any protection if he managed to draw a bead on me.

Really, my best way of dealing with either one of these guys was not to be seen. I was starting to edge towards the back door when I heard Shadow Stalker reply.

"I'm going home. I told you, Lee's gone. You guys can feel free to bag the gangbangers if you want. I gift wrapped them for you."

"I don't think so, young lady," Armsmaster said. I was starting to see how he could rub a person the wrong way. "At the very least, you're coming with us to give a statement about what happened here. And frankly, if you're going to be getting into fights like this, joining the Wards might not be optional."

"Whatever," Shadow Stalker replied. I could only assume the statement was accompanied by a rude gesture. The next thing I heard was a yelp of pain, followed by a shout. "What the fuck?"

"You should know that I always study my failures," Armsmaster said, his voice oozing with self-satisfaction. "Deducing your vulnerability to electricity is hardly the toughest puzzle I've ever had to solve."

I crept forward and risked a peek out the window. I could see Shadow Stalker standing a good twenty feet from the front door, wrapped up in a pair of black cords. Tracing the cords back to their source, I could see that they were attached to the shaft of Armsmaster's halberd, just behind the blade. He was standing on the street, a few feet in front of his motorcycle, flanked by Kid Win.

If I had taken a minute to think things through, I probably would have reacted differently. But something about the situation just set me off. He was pushing her around because, what? She was fighting the criminals it was his job to take care of, and she didn't want to join his little club? It reminded me too much of the girls who ruined my life just because they could. I couldn't fight back against them at school during the day, but there in the Docks at night it was very satisfying to see Armsmaster's eyes widen as twelve thousand, three hundred and forty one bugs came boiling up out of the warehouse and headed his way.

I had remembered correctly: Armsmaster's helmet exposed his cheecks and jaw, a fact I was quick to exploit by sending a squad of wasps at his face. I only let a couple of them inject venom, but I had the whole squad stinging away while the ground bound insects crawled up his legs and tried to work their way under his armor. He staggered backwards but didn't release the bindings on Shadow Stalker.

I diverted part of the swarm to go after Kid Win, just to discourage him from joining in. He hadn't yet gone for any of his pistols, but I figured it was better safe than sorry. He tried to swat at the incoming swarm but soon overbalanced and wound up falling backwards off his hoverboard.

I noted his status in the back of my mind while I focused on the team that I wanted to use to free my partner. Bugs in the wild don't really display a lot of cross species teamwork, but they can be surprisingly versatile when they operate under human direction. A team of house flies managed to airlift some of the stronger-jawed bugs I had available, and the lines trapping Shadow Stalker were soon festooned with a string of termites, cockroaches, and earwigs.

I gathered up the duffel bag and called back a good portion of the swarm to cover my movements as I made my way to Shadow Stalker's side. I wasn't sure what I could do-I really wished I had thought to pack a knife in my utility belt, since neither my pepper spray nor my epipens were going to do me much good here-but I wanted to at least have a chance to talk to her before I tried to make my escape.

Fortunately, Armsmaster hadn't worked any kind of special armor into his electrical cord. My bugs were through the outer layer of rubber pretty quickly, the steady stream of dying bugs and faint smell of ozone acting as markers of my progress. By the time I reached Shadow Stalkers side she had flickered in and out of her shadow state, the now dead electrical wire laying flat on the ground. I tugged on her shoulder and she joined me in running away, our movement masked by a cloud of insects.

Armsmaster was just starting to recover from my initial assault. I had so many bugs in the area that I hardly had to focus at all to sense his movements as he brought his halberd to bear and fired his grappling hook in our direction. I yanked Shadow Stalker to the side and it clattered past us. We were around the corner before he could rewind it for another shot.

I split off another cloud of bugs to act at a decoy at the first intersection we passed, but the heroes didn't seem to be interested in chasing us. Armsmaster probably figured it was a bad idea to go running after an unknown cape, especially when the only "crime" he really knew we had committed was getting into a fight with the ABB. I was pretty sure Kid Win lost his enthusiasm for the hunt about the same time that he discovered he had failed to bug-proof his hoverboard.

Still, we kept running for a good fifteen minutes or so before we ducked into an alley, reasonably confident we were no longer being pursued. It was at that point that I realized Shadow Stalker hadn't taken advantage of her shadow form to cover that much ground. It made sense-she couldn't keep bounding ahead if she was going to stay hidden by the bugs-but it was also pretty impressive. I had been running every day for the last three months to build up my stamina, and she didn't even look like she was breathing hard.

She also didn't look happy.

"Are you crazy?" She hissed. "You just attacked _Armsmaster_."

I was a little taken aback by the hostility. I took a deep breath before I responded.

"Did you want to join the Wards?"

"No, but-shit," she reached up as if to run her hand through her hair, but caught herself as she realized she was still in costume. "He's not the kind of guy who lets stuff go. It wasn't bad enough that we had Kaiser and Lung gunning for us?"

I studied her for a minute as I thought about what to say. I had known when I started out that I would be antagonizing the major gangs in Brockton Bay. I was willing to accept that as part of the cost of making a difference. But I had expected to be on the same side as the heroes, if not part of their teams. I still thought Armsmaster would ultimately realize that we were his allies, even if we had gotten off on the wrong foot. Looking at Shadow Stalker, though, I could tell she wasn't in the mood to hear it.

Instead of saying anything, I tossed her the bag.

"Here," I said. "We'll meet in a week and see how things look."

It did seem like a good idea to lay low for a while, but I did have a bit of an ulterior motive. I wouldn't be able to meet with anybody in Brockton Bay while I was out of town for the Winslow High sophomore class trip.

ooOoo


	3. Chapter 3

AN: As always, all comments appreciated. I like hearing what worked for you, what didn't, and why.

ooOoo

The end of the week marked the beginning of Spring Break, which I ordinarily would have welcomed simply for the respite from Emma and Sophia's attentions. Winslow High offered class trips over the break: a bus ride to and from a major city together with a few days touring local sites to try to impart some education to high schoolers during their vacation time. The sophomore trip this year was heading down to Washington, D.C., and as much as I might enjoy a trip to the capital, it wouldn't be worth being cooped up in close quarters with my peers if not for the announcement I had found online. The traveling Deadly Insects of the World exhibition was going to be at the Smithsonian's National Zoo while we were in town.

When I first started looking into insect acquisition I was a little surprised to discover that there was a vibrant community of bug collecting hobbyists out there. I guess I shouldn't have been shocked to discover that you can buy a tarantula over the Internet-this is America, after all-but it wasn't something I had ever really thought about before. Unfortunately, there were a few problems in the way of translating that discovery into a collection of exotic insects.

The first, now overcome, obstacle was a lack of funds. Our family wasn't exactly rolling in cash, and asking my dad to divert some of our money to purchase dangerous bugs from around the world was just begging for an awkward conversation. The second problem was the trouble involved in keeping them alive. Insects that weren't native to Brockton Bay would need to be kept in a heated environment to survive and, hopefully, reproduce. That ultimately came down to a money problem as well, and I was looking forward to getting electricity hooked up at my lair.

The final problem was a little more fundamental. Once your shopping needs move from "dangerous to a person" to "danger of city-wide infestation," people start getting a little more reluctant to sell. It also didn't seem like a great idea to follow up my public debut with that kind of shopping spree. That was why I had decided to turn to an alternate source.

Unfortunately, Brockton Bay is not exactly a thriving cultural hub. The local zoo's insect house was just sad, and waiting in town for any kind of decent touring exhibition to visit us would be a matter of years, not months. Finding the opportunity presented by our class trip was a real stroke of luck.

My dad was so happy to see me volunteer to spend more time with other high schoolers that he was smiling as he wrote the check to cover the cost of the trip. I didn't have the heart to disabuse him of the idea that things were going better for me at school.

The actual journey down there wasn't bad. Seven hours on a bus was never going to be my idea of a good time, but I was able to snag the seat next to Mrs. Knott, which meant that I was able to catch up on my reading mostly unmolested. Some of Emma's bolder hangers-on lobbed spitballs my way, but that was an old trick. I wrapped my hair up in a scarf for easier clean up later. They intensified their fire to try to ruin my clothing, but when one of their efforts caught our chaperone on the back of the neck, they received a blistering lecture that shut them down for the rest of the bus ride.

I knew it was only a temporary respite, but I did my best to put aside my worries and enjoy my book, a silly novelization of the adventures of Miss Militia. When I started getting motion sickness from reading in a moving vehicle I took a break and stared out the window, thinking about the real reason I was on this trip. I was a little nervous about my first real solo outing, especially when I was going to be out of costume. I knew breaking into a zoo wasn't exactly going to be like hitting Fort Knox, but the thought of being caught doing anything illegal was enough to send a shiver down my spine.

When I had just about worried myself out, I found my thoughts turning to the piece of news that I had been trying to avoid. The papers had reported that Oni Lee's body had been found, about half a mile from where Shadow Stalker and I had confronted him. I had made my first kill.

The strange thing was, I didn't feel bad about it at all. It wasn't like I didn't feel responsible: the spider had been under my direct control, and directing it to bite was as intimate and direct a way of harming somebody as punching them in the face. I just didn't care.

Oni Lee was a killer. He had chosen that path, and he was doing his best to kill my friend when I killed him back. In a world where my mother was taken from me by a freak accident, I couldn't find it in me to feel bad about what happened.

I did worry a little bit about what that lack of reaction said about me. I had always thought that violent people were different from other people; that people who had blood on their hands had been fundamentally changed by the experience. I didn't feel any different than I did yesterday. Did that mean that I had always been damaged somehow? Or that I was wrong, and everybody had the capacity for violence within themselves?

I was still chewing over that issue when we arrived at our hotel. We were staying at a place near DuPont Circle that had been chosen for its location rather than its quality. It presented one of those situation where my ability was a bit of a double edged sword: I had the reassurance that all of the bugs in the hotel were under my control and therefore harmless to me, but my intimate awareness of all of the insect life in the area told me more than I really wanted to know about the level of hygiene in our room.

I hesitated in the lobby, momentarily distracted by putting together a mental picture of the hotel's layout from its bug population. When I caught up with the rest of the group, I found out that the smooth sailing I had been enjoying so far was about to end: I was sharing a room with Emma, Sophia, and Madison. Mrs. Knott would be down the hall with the rest of the girls, while the boys who had come on the trip would be under Mr. Gladly's supervision. None of the girls would be likely to accept any request from me to trade spots; come to think of it, I couldn't think of anybody at school who would brave Emma's wrath to help me out.

I swallowed my complaints about our sleeping arrangements and followed the group up to our rooms. Mrs. Knott was setting an early curfew; we had eaten on the way down to Washington and she wanted to get an early start in the morning. Which meant I was going to be stuck in a room with a bored Emma Barnes. Lovely.

The room itself was nothing special. Two beds, a sleeper sofa, and a folding cot. There was a TV, which was nice, and the wall was decorated with some generic corporate artwork. Emma and Sophia tossed their bags on the beds to claim their spots, while Madison settled for the cot. The three of them moved over to the couch to watch tv, effectively claiming the last spot to sit down in the room.

I was left to stand awkwardly by the door, not sure what to do with myself. I was about to brave sitting on the foot of one of the beds when Emma turned around and caught my eye. I had the feeling that she had been waiting for this moment for a while.

"Taylor, why don't you do us a favor and get some ice?"

I just looked at her for a minute. If I refused to do her the "favor" then she would take that as an excuse to... well, to inflict whatever "prank" she was probably going to inflict on me later tonight anyway. Still, giving in would at least put off the inevitable for a little a while. The humiliation of being at her beck and call was just a drop in the bucket at this point. I grabbed the ice bucket with a sigh and left the room. I did make sure to bring my backpack with me-I definitely didn't want the three of them going through my supplies for this trip.

When I returned from the ice machine I could hear the tv through the door. I knocked on the door, but the only response was an increase in the volume of the television.

"Guys, seriously?" I called out. I thought I heard some laughter, but nobody came to open the door.

I shook my head as I set the ice bucket down and opened up the secondary pocket in my pack. One of the bundles of cash I had liberated from Empire 88 was waiting inside, and I peeled off a few bills to put in my pocket. I was smiling as I walked back down the hallway. Emma's drive to hurt me at every opportunity had made my school life hell for going on two years now. It was nice to be able to turn it to my advantage for once.

ooOoo

The lobby was deserted when I arrived. A single hotel employee sat behind the front desk, absorbed in whatever was being displayed on his cell phone. I waited in front of the counter for a few minutes, but he didn't look up until I cleared my throat.

"Yeah?" He asked. Not exactly a model of good customer service.

"They sent me down here to get another room for the next two nights," I said, doing my best to keep my voice level. "They said this will cover it."

I laid enough cash out on the counter to cover three nights, at least according to the rate quote online. He looked at me, then down at the cash, then back at me. I had a whole elaborate lie planned out, but some instinct made me bite my tongue. He looked back down at the money, then at his phone, then at me.

It was interesting, seeing the exact moment when he decided he didn't give enough of a fuck to hassle me about the room. He snagged a room key from beneath the desk, tossing it to me and sweeping the money off the counter in one motion.

"Room 304. Enjoy your stay," he said, speaking into his phone.

I paused for a moment after entering the new room to savor the thrill of victory. Sure, I had had to spend a few hundred bucks. And sure, Emma was hanging out with her friends while I was all alone in an empty hotel room. And sure-I forced myself to cut off that train of thought. The point was, I had gotten what I wanted, and I didn't even need to sic any bugs on her. I held that thought firmly in mind as I drifted off to sleep.

I woke up at 6:28, two minutes before the alarm went off, just like I usually did. Back home I woke up this early in order to get my morning jog in, but today it would serve a different purpose. After all, the teachers would not be amused if they found out that I had a room to myself.

I didn't waste any time taking a shower and getting dressed. The continental breakfast wasn't set up yet when I reached the lobby, so I settled down in an empty chair to read my book. I was surprised when Mrs. Knott showed up before I had a chance to read more than a few pages. She was dressed rather casually in a sweater and jeans; it was strange to see her in anything but her usual homeroom teacher dresses.

"Good morning Taylor," she said. "You're up early."

"Morning, Mrs. Knott," I replied. "Just an early riser, I guess."

She cocked her head and looked at me searchingly. "You know, if there have been any... issues with the sleeping arrangement, I'm sure one of the girls in my room would be willing to trade places with you."

"I'm fine," I said, wrestling my nerves under control. After all of the times I had prayed for a teacher to intervene at Winslow Hall, I couldn't believe that she had picked today of all days to finally notice what was going on.

"Are you sure?" She asked, clearly skeptical. "It wouldn't be any trouble."

"Really, it's fine," I said. "I get up this early at home so I can jog before school starts. They might not exactly be my best friends, but so far everybody's just enjoying the trip."

That seemed to assuage her fears-or maybe she was just trying to make a token effort in the first place. We made small talk for a little while, until other students started trickling into the room and I was finally left alone with my book. I had just reached the part where Miss Militia was leading the forces of humanity against an alien space-god when Mrs. Knott decided it was time for us to go.

The plan was to spend the morning touring the monuments on the National Mall. I managed to steer clear of Emma and Sophia when the teachers gathered us into a group to head out. Everything was within walking distance of the hotel, which was nice.

I had seen the Lincoln Memorial in my textbook, of course-as well as on the pennies in my pocket-but the pictures didn't really do a good job of conveying the feeling of solemnity the building inspired in person. Being in the presence of such a tangible connection to the Civil War was a sobering reminder that humans didn't need superpowers to slaughter each other in tremendous numbers.

The Jefferson Memorial and Washington Monument were each impressive in their own way, but I found myself lingering most in the Endbringer Memorial. Built out of white marble, it was built in a hexagon and had been crafted to look like some kind of Greek temple. Inside was a simple statue: five warriors in head to toe body armor, drawn up in a phalanx and protecting each other with shields nearly as tall as they were. No identifying features could be made out, but the figures on the end were of slighter build, and could have been women. Inscribed on the plinth in front of the statue was a poem written the last time tens of millions of people were dying in pointless battles.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:  
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.  
At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.

The walls of the temple were covered in tidy columns of engraved names. Near the ceiling, to the right of the door, I could just make out the inscription identifying "Kaveh the Smith," Behemoth's first victim. Name after name followed, crawling endlessly across the wall. Each name was accompanied by an alias, if applicable, and an icon identifying the Endbringer that had killed that person. Several columns in there was a long stretch of first and last names, with no cape identifier. It took me a second to puzzle it out: Leviathan's attack on New York City, when the President called out the National Guard. It had been a slaughter.

Perhaps the most ominous part of the memorial were the two walls that were still blank. I wondered if my name would be on those walls some day. I intended to help fight off the Endbringers, if I could, but my power didn't exactly cry out for me to join Alexandria, Legend, and Eidolon in the front lines against every attack. Still, as the names on the wall attested, you didn't have to have tremendous powers to fall victim to one of the Endbringers.

I was in a somber mood when I joined the group for our picnic lunch. I ate in silence, my mind turning over those thousands of names. It made me wonder a little bit about the value of what I was doing. I had had some success, but I felt a little guilty for taking proud of getting some drugs off the street when so many people had made the ultimate sacrifice to defend humanity.

I pushed those morbid thoughts away as our group split up for the afternoon. Most of my classmates were going on the White House tour, while a few of us would be spending an afternoon at the zoo. Even without my ulterior motive I would have ducked the White House tour: public information on the Secret Service's efforts to protect the President from parahumans was hard to come by, but I had to assume that it was world class. If there was any technology out there that could identify a cape, they would spot me the minute I stepped in the door. From what I overheard most of the zoo-goers had already been to the White House and wanted to see something new. For once it was lucky that I didn't have any close friends to whom I would have to explain my decision.

Mrs. Knott turned us loose once we got there, with instructions to meet by the entrance in four hours. My first impression on entering the zoo was that it was big. The panda exhibit by the main entrance seemed to be drawing in the bulk of the visitors, but I didn't hesitate to turn the other way and head for the exhibition hall where the deadly insects of the world were waiting.

ooOoo

If I had to describe the exhibit in one word, it would be "tacky." Give me a second word, and I would probably go with "very tacky."

An enormous inflatable spider reared up at the front of the building, positioned so that you walked through its mouth to enter the exhibit. Around it an ingenious arrangement of cables, crepe paper, and helium balloons gave the impression of a gigantic web stretching up into the sky. Next to the spider's mouth was a sign announcing "The World's Most Dangerous Insects... Enter if you Dare!"

I shook my head and walked inside. I guess if you want to compete for attention with the pandas you can't limit yourself to dignified advertising. The inside of the hall was quite dim compared to the sunny day outside; I paused for a moment to let my eyes adjust and reached out with my ability.

It was comforting. There were far more bugs in the area than I could usually contact in Brockton Bay, and far more species were represented. I still knew intellectually that even here I could hardly go toe to toe with someone like Alexandria, but having my mind connect to tens of thousands of bugs at once was still quite a rush.

The sheer diversity of bugs in the room was impressive. My power didn't give me access to their scientific names, but I could sense their position and get a rough sense of their size and body composition. For example, I could sense a truly enormous tarantula nearby.

The trip into the inflatable spider's gullet had let out into a high ceilinged room occupied by a maze of terrariums. I took a few steps forward and spotted the placard describing the Goliath birdeater. Glancing into the cage revealed a spider with a twelve inch leg-span staring back at me; my power told me it was trying to decide whether I was a threat. I was not.

Cool though it might be to command a horde of tarantulas, it just wasn't a practical idea. Smaller insects have quicker life cycles that allow for explosive population growth-or regrowth, if I should suffer severe losses in a fight. Tarantulas, on the other hand, usually take a few years to reach their full size. And while they might be giants compared to other spiders, when up against a human opponent they were still all too squishable.

I moved on and after a couple of twists and turns I was standing in front of an exhibit containing a pair of wasps along with what looked like a dead tarantula. My power told me differently, though, even without looking at the explanatory placard.

The tarantula hawk wasp reproduces by hunting down a tarantula, paralyzing it with its venom, and dragging it back to its nest. Then it lays a single egg on the paralyzed spider. When the egg hatches, the larva eats its way into the spider's insides. It instinctively knows to avoid the vital organs, so the spider remains alive while being slowly eaten away. The larva doesn't actually kill the spider until it is nearly full grown, ready to burst free from the corpse of its victim and start the cycle all over again.

It's not like the tarantula hawk is uniquely evil. There's a substantial branch of the wasp family tree that follows the same basic strategy with different species of spiders. My efforts to learn more about insects after my abilities manifested had taught me a few tidbits like this, which I had mentally filed away under the heading "nature is fucked up." I still felt a little uncomfortable seeing what amounted to spider torture porn being put on display for the viewing public.

Besides having horrifying reproductive habits, tarantula hawks were also known for their incredibly painful stings. I didn't take pleasure in hurting people, but it was a simple fact that one straightforward way to get somebody to stop fighting you is to hurt them badly enough that they give up. If I could do that with a relatively small amount of venom, I could end fights in my favor with no risk of doing permanent harm. I verified that the female wasp still had enough genetic material stored up for a few more eggs before I moved on to the center of the room.

The tarantula hawk was widely regarded as having the second-most painful sting in the world, the world champion in that matter being the bullet ant, so named because the pain its venom inflicted was said to be comparable to being shot. I could tell that I was moving towards a bullet ant colony that was larger than I had expected from the advertisement. The colony was actually large enough to have produced several virgin queens, which was a very nice break indeed.

The reason for the oversized colony became clear as I left the pathway formed by the terrariums near the entry way and entered the cleared area in the center of the exhibition hall. Just to my right was a small booth with a sign offering the visitors to chance to undergo the "Satere-Mawe Challenge." The bullet ant colony was located behind the booth, which I could only assume was there to allow volunteers to undergo the rite of passage I had read about online: wearing a glove lined with bullet ants for ten minutes. Not something I would sign up for if I didn't have the ability to stop them from stinging, but I suppose there's somebody out there willing to try anything.

Standing in the center of the exhibition hall gave me a clearer idea of the layout of the room from a human perspective. The exhibit was contained in a single enormous room with a ceiling that arched twenty feet over our heads. The terrariums that held individual exhibits were placed around the edges of three sides of the room so as to create winding paths for the visitors to explore. Against the back wall there was an elevated room within a room. Built with a glass front, the room measured about ten feet by twenty feet and it was currently occupied by a hive of Asian giant hornets. A notice posted at the front of the display said that the next show would be starting in half an hour.

The first time I saw a picture of the Asian giant hornet, I thought it was fake. They're two inches long, about the size of an adult man's thumb, and have the distinction of being the apex predators of the insect world in Asia. Really, not many non-insect animals wanted to tangle with them either. A sting from one was not only painful, but dangerous. The guidelines I had seen said that a person who suffered ten stings should seek medical attention, and somebody who had been stung thirty times should seek emergency medical attention.

I felt torn about adding the giant hornet to my swarm. There was no question that it would give me more offensive firepower, but it might be a little too much. This wasn't a bug that needed an allergic reaction to kill. It didn't even really need direction from me-the giant hornet racked up a body count every year in Japan and China. On balance, it seemed a little more like a bug that a villain would use rather than one that would be in a hero's toolkit.

The deciding factor for me was Oni Lee. I knew that Lung would have it out for me after we stole from him, but with Oni Lee's death the situation had almost certainly turned into a blood feud. It was now a near certainty that I would be fighting Lung, which meant that I needed to get my hands on the most dangerous bugs that I could. With his regeneration, there was little chance of accidental (or, for that matter, deliberately inflicted) death.

I took a seat next to a lovely coral blue tarantula and took out a book to give me something to keep my eyes on while my thoughts were elsewhere. I focused my attention on my sense of the ant colony and, in particular, the virgin queens. Usually ants were pre-programmed to avoid mating with members of their same colony, but I could override that instinct. I felt a little bad about using my mind control powers to force what was basically incestual sex, but ants didn't really have the sort of higher consciousness needed to feel bad about that kind of thing.

I was distracted from my slightly voyeuristic task when a group of people in front of me started chanting out some guy's name. I put the mating ants to the back of my mind and looked up in time to see a college age guy-presumably the "Randy" who was being cheered on-step up to the booth.

"I'm here to take the challenge!" Randy announced, loud enough for me to hear him clearly. His two buddies clapped him on the back. The three of them looked like they could have been on the football team together.

"If you'll just step this way so we can take care of the legal preliminaries..." The intern manning the booth-and as much as it might be rough to work with scary bugs all the time, I was pretty sure the worst part of his job was the garish t-shirt he was forced to wear-led the three of them to a door in the back wall marked "Employees Only." He pulled out his keyring and soon the group had disappeared into the back room.

I put the distraction out of my mind and focused on the ants. Yep, she was definitely no longer a virgin queen.

When the group of guys exited the back room and headed back to the booth, Randy looked considerably less gung ho than he had before. The intern unlocked a drawer, pulling out something that looked kind of like an oven mitt. I could sense hundreds of bullet ants sewn into the lining, agitated from being held in place for so long.

"In the Satere-Mawe tribe," the intern announced, speaking not just to Randy but also to the crowd that had gathered to watch, "a boy is not considered a man until he can keep a glove like this one on each hand for ten minutes and suffer through the twenty four hours of pain caused by the ants inside without shedding a single tear.

"Now, Randy," he continued, "you've signed all of the necessary paperwork, but it's not too late: are you sure you want to go through with this?"

Randy hesitated, then thrust his hand out. "Do it."

Without another word, the intern slipped the glove over his hand. I could sense the ants inside stinging, over and over. Randy lasted about five seconds before he tore the glove off his hand.

"Shit! Fuck, motherfucker," his voice trailed off as he crouched down, curled around his hand as though to shield it from the world. The stream of obscenities gradually turned into a stream of sobs. His whole body was shaking with each sob, snot dripping down his face as he cried, all inhibitions apparently driven away by the pain. After a minute a pair of exhibit employees half-led, half-carried him into the back room, hopefully to provide medical treatment.

A hush fell over the crowd after that. To see a big strong guy completely unmanned like that by such a tiny thing drove home the danger that insects could pose in a way that no scientific explanation could.

The still was broken by an announcement over the intercom system.

"Ladies and gentlemen, our next demonstration will begin shortly. Please direct your attention to our primary showcase."

I turned along with the rest of the crowd to look at the room-sized display case that held the giant hornets. A man in a beekeeping suit opened a door in the back of the room, then helped guide a large table on wheels through the door. A similarly dressed partner became visible as he finished pushing the table into the room. The two of them pushed the table up against the front of the display, then beat a quick retreat out of the room. What was left behind was a large beehive, hanging from a rack on top of the table.

It didn't take long for one of the scouting hornets to spot the beehive and attack. He was soon joined by twenty-seven other hornets and the fight turned into a rout. The hornets were large enough that they could take a bee's head off with a single snip of their mandibles, and were too well armored for the bees to do any damage in retaliation. They began systematically working their way through the hive; I had seen a video of a similar attack online, but seeing it in person and following it with my power made clear the cruel efficiency that the hornets brought to this task, which resembled the activities of a slaughterhouse more than any kind of battlefield.

I forcibly turned my attention from the ongoing massacre to the hornets left in the hive. Wasps are different from honeybees in a lot of ways, the most pertinent of which to me was the creation of a queen. Queen bees are the result of different treatment during the larval stage; once a bee grows up and becomes a worker, it will be a worker forever. All female wasps, on the other hand, had the potential to become fertile. It took a specific combination of pheremones and environmental factors or, if you were me, it took a politely phrased mental request.

I turned on the fertility of three of the hive's workers and had them get busy with the hive's drones. All of this was taking place inside of the hive; I looked up to confirm that it was invisible to the audience and was startled to see a familiar head of hair in the crowd. Sophia Hess was here.

My first reaction was shock, and a little bit of fear. Had she followed me? I couldn't imagine she would assault me in a public place, but she had done a lot of things that I couldn't imagine she would do. The fear settled down once it became clear that her attention was fixed on the show.

She worked her way to the front of the crowd, staring intently at the ongoing slaughter. I tagged her with a handy mosquito and looked back down at my book. Five minutes later, she was still there. Ten minutes later, she was still there. After fifteen minutes had passed, I looked up to confirm what the mosquito was telling me. She was still standing in the same place, her eyes locked on the giant hornets as they methodically killed bee after bee.

She didn't leave until almost an hour after I had first noticed her. I marked the direction she took when she left the exhibit. The zoo was pretty big and it was unlikely that I would run into her, but I wanted to keep the odds of such a thing as low as possible.

I had long since confirmed that the mating had been successful, both of the ants and of the hornets. I triggered the hibernation instincts of my newly minted queen hornets, leaving them safely hidden away in the depths of the hive, then stood and stretched. I felt a rush of exhilaration pass through me: the encounter with Sophia had been a false alarm, and things were going even better than I had expected.

On a whim, I turned and waved goodbye to the cobalt tarantula that had been keeping me company for the last hour, using my power to make it wave back. I was just turning to go when I heard a gasp.

Looking down, I saw a little kid staring at me in amazement. A quick glance-and bug check-around the area confirmed that nobody else had seen my little indiscretion, and I couldn't help myself. I winked at him, then walked away.

As I left the hall, I saw that the kid had climbed up on the bench and was waving enthusiastically at a very confused spider.

I was able to enjoy the rest of the afternoon without running into Sophia again. While I was looking at the lions, tigers, and bears, I used the local flying insects to scout out the locations of the zoo's surveillance cameras. There weren't as many as I had feared, but they did seem to be set up so that every area accessible to visitors was covered by at least one camera.

I made it back to the entrance with enough time to run across the street to the grocery store. The items I needed to pick up didn't take much space in my backpack, and I went ahead and grabbed an ice cream sandwich while I was there. With all the running I'd been doing I figured I could afford it.

It really was a nice day. I had a hard time acting dejected when Emma kicked me out of our hotel room again.

ooOoo

The next day, our last in Washington, our class went to the Smithsonian Museum. I was a little skeptical about spending the whole day in one building, but when we got there I understood. The museum was enormous, packed to the gills with historically significant stuff. I was most interested in the parahuman wing, naturally.

One thing I couldn't help but notice was the imposing degree of security present in the building. I didn't want to draw attention by having the bugs in the area do anything unnatural, but just by connecting to them I could get some sense of the building's construction. There was some heavy metal reinforcement in the walls, along with heavy duty blast shields ready to drop down over the windows and most of the doorways.

I couldn't even begin to figure out all of the devices that had been put into place to detect thieves. I had a pretty strong feeling that anybody who attempted to rob the museum was only going to leave when the heroes showed up to take them to the Birdcage.

I could see why they were worried. There were some pretty amazing pieces of history here. The bible that had been used to swear in the founding members of the Protectorate, together with pictures of the occasion signed by Alexandria, Eidolon, and Legend. Costumes worn by famous members of the Protectorate over the years. Even Hero's famous armor and energy guns.

Some of the Tinker-made gear was not only historically significant, but also dangerous, and I was just as happy to know that it was safely secured. With the help of some strategically placed mosquitoes I was able to avoid the unpleasant attentions of my classmates, and all in all it was a pleasant day at the museum.

When Emma slammed the door to the hotel room in my face, it was time for the real work to begin.

Well, almost time. The first step in the plan was to wait up in my room until I was confident that everybody else was asleep. When the clock turned to eleven I double checked my pockets and left my room. The guy behind the desk didn't even look up from his phone when I strode through the lobby and out the door.

I was wearing sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt that I had chosen more for the carrying capacity in the front pocket than as any kind of fashion statement. With my hair up in a ponytail and my feet in sneakers, I could have been going for my morning run if not for the late hour. After taking a cursory look around, I set off toward the zoo.

It was an easy twenty minute jog. The neighborhood wasn't the greatest-I didn't see anybody else out exercising-but it didn't feel any sketchier than passing through the Docks back home. I kept a screening force of flies and mosquitoes a block or so ahead of me to make sure that I didn't run in to anybody too unsavory.

The run passed uneventfully, and I soon found myself passing the main entrance to the zoo, then turning into a small alley and the service entrance that I had marked on my last visit. I sent my screening force ahead, this time looking not for crooks but for cops. There was nobody waiting on the other side of the door, so I flipped my hood up and reached into my pocket to retrieve my tools.

The first thing I needed was the stack of fabric pieces I had cut from the lining of my scarf. The two inch by two inch squares were easy enough for a small group of flies to handle, and one such team soon had the camera on the other side of the door blocked off.

The second thing that I pulled out of my pocket was a small test tube. I pulled the cork off the top and held it horizontal next to the lock on the door.

The incident that had led to the development of my parahuman abilities had also left me with a healthy fear of being locked in small spaces. There wasn't much I could do about my dislike of small spaces, but I did take some comfort in learning how to get through a lock without having the key.

If you want to pick a lock, you need a few things. A torsion wrench to let you turn the cylinder. A pick to manipulate the pins inside the lock. A delicate sense of touch and sensitive pair of ears helped a lot, as did the experience to recognize what was going on inside the lock from a minimal amount of feedback.

The physical tools required were easy enough to improvise, and the rest of it... well, mom always said if you weren't cheating, you weren't trying. I reached out to the dust mites inside the vial and helped guide them into the lock.

The mites were far too weak to directly influence the inner workings of the lock, of course. However, my power over insects extended to a very direct sense of where the bugs I was controlling were located, so as the mites oozed into the lock I was able to put their locations together and form a three dimensional picture of the lock's interior. I put the vial away and took out my lockpick set once enough of the mites were in place.

The three dimensional image of the lock updated in real time as I worked on it, and I was through to the other side in about thirty seconds. Maybe a minute, if you counted the time I spent gathering the dust mites back into the vial. I closed the door behind me and closed my eyes to focus on what came next.

The first order of business was to mark each of the cameras within my range. I remembered more or less where they were from my scouting expedition, but marking them with a bug made it a lot easier to keep track of them. With a bug perched on the lens and another on the back I had a decent sense of what each camera could see. I could control bugs out to a block and a half or so, maybe two on a good day (or a small block), so I was pretty sure I outranged the cameras.

Once that was done I sent out my flies with their fabric squares to block the cameras watching my planned route, then sent out a swarm to check for any night watchmen. I didn't expect anybody to be out patrolling the zoo at night, but better safe than sorry. I kept the screening swarm spread out; I didn't want it to show up on camera, and the bugs only needed to be close enough together to be able to sense any human passing between them.

After confirming that the way was clear, I headed for the exhibition hall. The moon was a little more than half full; it lit the night just enough to paint my surroundings as a kind of eerie fantasy land. It was spooky to walk around such a completely deserted park, and my eyes kept playing tricks on me, making me think I was seeing motion in my peripheral vision. It didn't help that the park was full of wild animals-I just about jumped out of my skin when an honest to goodness lion decided to let out a full throated roar.

I did my best to stay calm and keep focused on the feedback my bugs were giving me. I was a little surprised that I was able to keep several teams of camera-blocking bugs working along with the screening force without affecting my own ability to walk where I wanted to go. I hadn't had the occasion to have them work on so many discrete tasks at once before. The multi-tasking had to be part of my power-I can pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time, but that's about it.

I knew I was getting close to the exhibition hall when I felt the mass of foreign insects up ahead. The giant inflatable spider had been put away, but the building was still recognizable even in dim light. The front door didn't offer any more of an obstacle than the entry to the zoo had, and I was soon inside.

It was just about pitch black inside, which was fine with me. Rather than use a flashlight, I brought a couple thousand flies and mosquitoes into the building with me and used them to feel out where I was going. When I reached the terrarium that held the tarantula hawks and their victim, I stopped and reached into my pocket.

I had several small plastic jars in my pocket, and in the absence of any light I had to lift each one before I found the one with some heft to it. Taking the lid off of the terrarium, I unscrewed the lid of the jar and withdrew the ground beef that I had packed inside. I rolled up some meatballs and set them down by the paralyzed spider.

At my direction, the female wasp laid an egg on each of the meatballs. I had picked up the ground beef at the supermarket to use in lieu of tarantulas for the growing larvae. It wasn't exactly what they had evolved to use, but in my experience most insects weren't too picky about their source of protein. Besides which, the zoo would probably notice if a bunch of tarantulas went mising.

Wasps can control the gender of the larva that each egg would produce, so I knew I would eventually have two males and two females if this worked. Eggs in place, I had the mother wasp land on each meatball in turn so that I could pick them up without seeing them and pack them back into the jar. Task complete, I put the lid back on the terrarium and headed for the center of the room. My swarm swept out ahead of me, painting a picture of the room that was if anything clearer than what a flashlight would have revealed to my eyes.

The bullet ant challenge booth had been wheeled away, but the colony was still there. I pried the lid up an inch, then called out the fertilized queen. She wasn't going to take up much room in my collection jar, so I grabbed a few workers to go along with her. They obediently walked into the jar, and I made sure the lid was securely closed on the colony and on my new acquisitions.

That left the giant hornets, which were still in the pride of place on the main stage. It didn't have a convenient access point; the only way in or out was the door that the workers had used to wheel in the bee hive. I walked towards the "employee's only" door, confident that it would give me access to my target. I picked up the pace when the bugs outside detected somebody approaching the door to the exhibition hall. I didn't know who it was, but it couldn't be good for me.

I don't think it took any longer to open the door than it had any of the others, but it sure felt like it took forever. While one part of my mind was reporting what was happening inside the lock and another was manipulating the lockpick, a third part was reporting on the inexorable approach of what was most likely a security guard.

I got the door open at about the same time that the guard opened the outer door to the hall. I slipped into the back room and shut the door as the lights came on in the main hall. I held back a sigh of relief and settled down to wait for the guard to leave.

It was frustrating, not being able to see or hear through my bugs. I couldn't be sure who was out there, and all I could do was follow their motion through a mosquito perched on their collar. They threaded their way through the exhibits by the entrance, and as they entered the main exhibit I started to hear something-not through my bugs, but through the door.

"... don't see anything. This place gives me the creeps."

There was a squawk of what sounded like a voice on a walkie-talkie.

"I don't know. They bought those cameras from the lowest bidder."

I started to feel a little less clever about blocking the video cameras on my way in. Fortunately, the guard had stopped moving, and seemed unlikely to check the back room where I was hiding. Not that I was in any actual danger with the sheer quantity of bugs in the building, but I didn't want to get into an altercation with somebody who was just doing his job.

There was another squawk. This time when the man spoke he sounded irritated.

"Yeah, no. You want to be the great pest detective and have somebody hang out with the giant spiders and giant ants and giant bees, you can do that your own self."

The mosquito on his head moved away, and his argument with the voice on the walkie-talkie gradually faded below my ability to hear. I waited until he had left the hall before I let out a sigh of relief. I knew I was going to have to come up with a new exit strategy, but first I had to get what I was there for.

Fortunately, the back room that I was hiding in was not very large, and the doorway that led to the hornets was easy to find. My scouts let me know that there were several plastic signs hanging on the door, which I assumed were warnings against stepping into the room unprepared. That would hardly be a problem for me.

The door wasn't even locked-I guess they figured the deadly hornets were enough to keep unauthorized visitors away. It was a simple matter to open the door, wake the hibernating queens, and have them fly themselves into my storage jars. They were soon hibernating once more in my pocket, leaving me to ponder how to get back to the hotel.

First things first. I made my way to the door leading out of the exhibition hall and used the bugs outside to thoroughly scan the area. Nothing. I briefly entertained the idea of a team of police officers waiting just outside my range before dismissing it as paranoia: nobody knew how my powers worked at that level of detail, and really they didn't have any reason to suspect that I was here. If they did think they had a parahuman on the loose, they probably thought it was a tinker turning the cameras on and off.

Still, no need to be careless. If they could follow the trail of blacked out cameras to the exhibition hall, they could follow it back to the entrance that I had used before. That meant that simply retracing my steps was out.

I had five teams of bugs on camera blocking duty. I had them block all of the cameras within my range before I stepped out of the exhibition hall. As I started moving, away from the direction I had arrived, I made sure that they kept blocking as many cameras as possible, not just the ones that could see me. No point making myself easy to track by being too precise.

It only took a few minutes of walking to reach the side door I was looking for. I bit back a curse when I saw that it had been padlocked shut with a length of chain. Not that I couldn't open the padlock, but chaining the door behind me would be difficult. Even worse, the street it fed on to was the home of a popular night club. A line of people on the opposite side of the street had a perfect view of the door. I kept walking.

Plan C was a stretch of wall that had been overgrown with ivy. As I headed in that direction I gathered together as many spiders as I could. The zoo was basically a park with some animal habitats built into it, so there was a decent level of arachnid population. I had the spiders climb up onto me as they arrived-I didn't like having them against my bare skin, but I didn't mind them catching a ride on my sweats-and start working together to weave a silk cord.

When I reached the section of wall that I wanted I stepped off the path and kept the camera blocking squads moving forward. The camera in this area of the zoo was actually located between the footpath and the wall, facing the path, so I was able to unblock it without worrying about being spotted. Hopefully anybody trying to be clever would think that I had kept on going past this spot.

I eyed the ivy-covered wall doubtfully. I had never made much progress on the rope climb at school, and I wasn't sure how much it would help to have a wall to brace off of. I couldn't help but feel a pang of jealousy as I thought of Shadow Stalker's ability to leap over walls like this. For that matter, most of the capes I could think of wouldn't really be inconvenienced by a wall: Kid Win and his hoverboard would just float over, Glory Girl could fly, Armsmaster probably had some wall-climbing gizmo in his halberd, Miss Militia-well, she could probably handle a rope climb. Of course, none of them would ever need to rob a zoo in the first place.

I cut myself off before I could really get going on my pity party and checked on my spiders' progress. They had managed to put together a length of silk cord about fifteen feet long and half as wide as my pinky. When I gave it some experimental tugs it didn't have any give; if spider silk really was as strong as everybody said I was pretty sure it would handle my weight.

I handed one end off to some flying bugs that carried it up to the top of the wall. It was a little tricky to tie a knot around the ivy, but the vines hadn't grown in completely flush with each other, so they was able to eventually work it through and form the knot. I tugged on the bottom until it was tight, briefly hanging from the line to verify that it would hold my weight. I then handed off the other end to another team of fliers, and had them wrap it around a pair of vines in a spiral all the way down to the ground.

I used the footholds provided by the wraps of cord to help support my weight as I scrambled up the wall. It was only about twelve feet high, and felt more like climbing up a ladder than anything else. When I reached the top I paused to confirm that the street on the other side was deserted before I hauled myself up to straddle the wall.

The other side was bare of plant life, but that was no problem. My bugs were able to unwrap the silk cord from the vines, and once I had a hold on it my decent was simple enough. I had the spiders chew through the silk up near the knot and packed the cord away. It seemed like the kind of thing that could be handy to have available.

I had jogged halfway back to the hotel when I stopped because my facial muscles felt odd. It took me a minute to realize that I had been smiling ever since I left the zoo.

ooOoo

One week after the last time I had seen Shadow Stalker, I was seated at the desk in my lair. I had three Asian giant hornet nests growing nicely in separate terrariums downstairs, and the bullet ant colony was also doing well. It would be a week or so before the worker ants started showing up, and another two weeks before any adult giant hornets were produced, but so far everything seemed to be going smoothly. The tarantula hawk larvae had taken to the ground beef, although there was a big of a snag. The beef I had originally provided had gone off-something that's not a problem when your food is alive-and I had had to provide fresh. Fortunately I had enough carrion eating bugs that I didn't actually have to handle the rotten meat myself.

My focus was on how I could convince Shadow Stalker to keep working together. Our abilities complemented each other nicely, and I didn't want to lose what might be a lifelong friendship over one fight with Armsmaster. I was writing in the same journal I had used to put together my original team-up ideas, using the light of the latern I had put on the desk. Also on the desk were my new taser and combat baton. It seemed silly not to have what I needed for personal defense now that I could easily afford it, but I still hadn't figured out how to store everything in my costume so that it was comfortable when I was sitting down.

I was in the middle of working out an argument that I thought could be a real winner when a monster came crashing through the wall. 


	4. Chapter 4

AN: As always, all comments are appreciated.

ooOoo

The thing that came crashing through my wall was the size of a small horse. It looked like somebody had crossed a lizard with a tiger along with a heaping helping of "terrifying." Its body was dotted with ridges where bone was jutting out from its insides, and it was heavy with muscle that in places had actually burst out of its skin like an overstuffed sausage.

Fortunately it had entered the side of the room opposite from where I was sitting, so I had time to stand, snatch the taser off of the desk, and start calling my swarm to me before it turned and spotted me. I managed to jump out of the way of its first charge. I was able to follow its motion as it passed through a wave of bugs to hit the wall hard enough to send a shudder through the whole building.

The hundreds of wasps that were stinging the creature were having little effect, and I wasted no time before heading for the door. Staying in a confined area with a monster like that was just asking for trouble. I hadn't taken more than a couple of steps towards the door when my left foot shot out from under me and I crashed to the ground.

I was able to sense through my swarm that another monster had jumped in through the hole in the wall, and this one carried riders. One of them was just lowering an outstretched hand, while the other dismounted from the beast and began striding toward me with confidence. I directed my wasps to switch their attention to the intruders, but they were well protected-the outfits they were wearing didn't expose any skin, and they had topped them off with beekeeper's veils to guard their faces.

I set the wasps to start chewing through the veils. That kind of gear is designed to protect humans from bugs' instinctive behaviors, and can be surprisingly vulnerable to bugs that were directed by a human intelligence. As the thought occurred to me, I started having the bugs downstairs chew through the screens on the window.

By now the bugs were thick enough in the air that the room was pitch black, but the figure walking towards me didn't hesitate. While she-I had enough bugs on her by now to sense the general shape of her figure-was walking towards me, the guy who had remained behind tossed two objects into opposite corners of the room; each was releasing some kind of vapor, and I started losing contact with the nearby wasps as they started to die off. I maneuvered the rest of the swarm away from the bug bombs and redoubled my efforts to break through the veils my attackers were wearing.

The girl stopped just out of arm's reach. I had been considering whether or not to attack her myself when she drew close enough, a thought that I abandoned when she drew a handgun from a pouch in her costume and aimed it next to my head.

The sound of the gun going off was amazingly loud. It drove all conscious thought out of my head, and my swarm momentarily faltered in its attack. The girl gestured at the bugs around her before waggling the gun meaningfully. She said something that I couldn't make out over the ringing in my ears, but the meaning was clear enough.

I had my bugs break off the attack, first flying up to the ceiling and then streaming out through the new hole in the wall. As I did, I noticed that another beast, carrying another two riders, had made its way into my increasingly crowded office. I stashed my bugs on the roof-out of sight, but hopefully close enough to come to my aid if I was able to turn the tables-and lifted my head to get my first look at my attackers.

I couldn't see too clearly, even with the bugs gone-the moonlight wasn't lighting up the room the way it had been before. The the battery powered lantern I was using to read had been knocked to the ground in our fight, and was currently positioned by the foot of the second monster to enter the fight, illuminating the boy who had thrown the bug bombs. He was wearing a garishly painted carnival mask that looked more decorative than functional, and in his ruffled shirt and skin tight leggings he didn't cut a particularly intimidating figure.

The gun in her hand made the girl closest to me intimidating enough. She was wearing the kind of skintight costume that I would never have dared to try to pull off, black with some pale blue highlights. She pulled off the veil she was wearing to reveal a head of dirty blond hair and the kind of triumphant grin that I had grown all too familiar with seeing from Emma over the last year and a half.

She tucked the veil under her arm and fished around in the pouches she had attached to her costume for a second, before removing a glowstick and activating it with a crack. She waved at the two late entrants, one of whom responded with a sharp whistle. The riderless monster trotted over obediently and rested one paw heavily on my chest. The blonde put her gun away, apparently confident that I wasn't going to try anything.

The taller of the two riders activated another glowstick as he slid off of the beast, illuminating himself and his companion. He was dressed all in black-what looked like black motorcycle leathers topped off with a black helmet, the visor replaced with a stylized skull. Even without any specialized equipment, he was well protected from bugs. I might be able to work something into his helmet, but it would take time.

The last girl was hardly in costume at all. She wore a cheap, hard plastic rottweiler mask to cover her face, but was otherwise dressed in a plaid skirt, army boots, and a torn-up sleeveless T-shirt. Not exactly high fashion, but nothing that would mark her out as a cape without the mask.

The glowstick also cast light on the explanation for the darkness. Where the wall of the room had been smashed only a flat black plane was visible-I couldn't see anything at all of the street outside. If I wasn't maintaining contact with the bugs outdoors, I would almost think that the whole building had been dropped into a cave somewhere.

"Well, Tattletale?" The man in black asked. His voice was deep and intimidating, even muffled as it was by the helmet he wore.

"Yeah, yeah, don't rush me," the blonde girl, Tattletale, said, waving her hand dismissively. Her smile never wavered as she focused on me. "So, where are you keeping the cash?"

I just stared at her. The initial shock of the attack was starting to fade, giving way to an increasingly powerful sense of shame and humiliation. All of my dreams of cleaning up the city had just been swept aside by a group of teenagers. They'd come to the place where I was strongest and subdued me in about a minute flat; nothing I had done had slowed them down at all, much less come close to driving them off.

I swallowed hard, but didn't answer. I didn't want to tell them anything, but more than that I was afraid that if I started talking I was going to burst into tears.

"Behind the poster," Tattletale said after a minute. I stared at her, shocked. I was sure that I hadn't even glanced at the poster of Miss Militia that was hanging on the wall where my desk had been.

The man in black walked over, making a crunching noise as each footstep crushed the dead wasps littered on the ground throughout the room. He took down the poster and quickly found the wall panel that had been rigged for easy removal. I kept my eyes on Tattletale as he removed it to reveal what was hidden in the walls.

"Jesus fuck! You could have warned me."

"Watch out, the bug controlling girl might have bugs guarding her money," Tattletale said, her voice dry. She rolled her eyes and winked at me, as if inviting me to share in the joke. "Don't worry though, she's playing nice. Right?"

I nodded and the wasps in the wall flew outside to join the rest of my swarm. The bugs downstairs had managed to open up a gap in the screen, and I had those that were able crawl up to perch on the outside walls. I wasn't feeling optimistic about my chances-this whole robbery had been too well planned-but I didn't want to just give up.

"The cash is hidden inside the hives, by the way," she called out, startling me once again. She smiled at me, that self-satisfied smile that seemed so familiar. "I don't know why everybody thinks their hiding places are so clever. I mean, we found this place by checking out what everybody was calling 'the creepy bug house.' Really, you should be grateful we showed up here before Kaiser caught wind of this place."

That struck a nerve. It was a variation on a theme Emma had been happy to drive home throughout high school. I should be grateful they decided to give some of my textbooks back. I should be grateful they only ruined my gym clothes. I should be grateful they eventually told somebody to get me out of the locker.

The rush of anger pushed aside the fear and disappointment I had been feeling, and I finally found my voice.

"I'll find a way to thank you properly for this, some day."

"Will you now?" Tattletale's smile didn't waver one bit as she turned and walked over to my overturned desk. She kneeled down and picked something out of the detritus on the floor: my journal. I felt my blood run cold. I had written down my thoughts in code, but if she was some kind of Thinker-which seemed likely-the simple substitution cipher was unlikely to stand up for long.

My fears were confirmed as she paged through the journal as if it were written in plain text. She hummed to herself as she read. The only other sound in the room was the crunching noise of the man in black tearing through the wasp's nests in the wall, punctuated by the occasional thump as he dropped a wad of bills in the backpack by his feet.

I was distracted from my fear of what Tattletale might read when my bugs outside felt an unnatural air current. I wouldn't have taken note of it if I hadn't gotten so used to keeping an eye out for that sort of thing: Shadow Stalker was here. Specifically, she was on the roof of the house across the street.

I drew up a curtain of bugs in front of her, desperately trying to keep her from blundering into the middle of the situation. She stopped, and I could tell that she spoke, but unfortunately I had no idea what she said. I quickly gathered up the moths in the area and had them hover against the background of the other bugs, spelling out a word with their white wings: "ROBBERY." She said something else, unslinging her crossbow from her back, and I quickly repositioned the moths: "WAIT... CAN'T... HEAR... YOU."

Shadow Stalker nodded, then knelt down to take a stable firing position with her crossbow. Back inside the room, I had a mosquito drift down to land on the eyebrow of the beast that was holding me down. I hardly had to guide it at all-even to my nose the monster smelled like rotting meat, and every instinct the moquito possessed was telling it that it had a fine meal in store.

I was positioning a line of bugs outside to give Shadow Stalker a place to aim when Tattletale spoke.

"Putting on a mask to try to get away from who you are," she said, shaking her head. "I think that's the saddest thing I've read this week."

She set the journal down and stood up, giving me a pitying look.

"It won't work, you know. Even if you're wearing a mask, you're still you," she said. "You might make some friends who just see the mask, but eventually they'll figure out who you really are. And, well, who would want to be friends with that?"

I flinched back at the outpouring of emotions triggered by her words. Before they could get too badly out of control I firmly pushed down the hopelessness I was feeling, promising myself that I would deal with it later. I diverted my intention instead to Shadow Stalker, who was aiming straight down the line of flies between her and the black void leading into my office. I rearranged the moths once more: "3... 2..."

Tattletale was watching me closely, no doubt savoring the impact as her barbs struck home. Something must have given the game away; her eyes widen and she yanked the protective veil over her head. She was just starting to call out to the others when the crossbow bolt slammed home in the eye of the monster holding me down. Then things started happening very quickly.

The beast reared back in pain, and I rolled myself as far away from it as I could. At the same time, a horde of bugs came pouring in through the gap in the wall. Between the swarm of wasps and the mass of creepy-crawlies from downstairs, it was nearly enough to fill the room. I called a good portion of them to me to obscure my position and I started repositioning a new line of flies outside to guide Shadow Stalker's next shot.

The robbers reacted quickly. The boy in the carnival mask pulled his veil on, but too late-I had already gotten a mass of bugs down the gap between the back of his neck and his fancy shirt. He was wearing some kind of armor underneath, but there were gaps, and I set my bugs to biting and stinging where they could. I didn't hold back with the wasp venom; it was unlikely he was allergic, and if he was I had an epi pen that I would be happy to trade to them in exchange for all of the money they were stealing.

Tattletale and the man in black were too well protected for my bugs to do anything. Well, not directly. As he bent down to pick up the backpack full of cash, a crossbow bolt slammed home in his left shoulder. He dropped the bag, but managed to snatch it up with his right hand before hunkering down behind one of the monsters. I felt a strange ripple pass through the bugs I had outside, and Shadow Stalker's third shot was well off target.

The other girl was almost completely unprotected, and I didn't show her any mercy. She had been the one ordering the monsters around, and I didn't want her to be able to sic any of them on me. She screamed, but managed to reach down and slap the monster she was on on its haunches. It leapt out through the hole in the wall; the other three wasted no time mounting up on the remaining two and soon bounded out into the night.

I tracked the cloud of bugs that I had set to harass them, but at the speed the monsters could move they were quickly out of range. I hauled myself back to me feet, then hugged my arms across my chest.

I guess driving them off like that was a victory, but the hollow sensation in my chest didn't feel like triumph.

ooOoo

I'm not sure how long I stood there, staring at the absolute darkness where the wall used to be. The only sound in the room was the skittering of cockroaches moving to haul away the dead wasps that were scattered over the floor. I tried to focus on what to do next; I was going to have to move, and longer term I needed to figure out if any of my spur of the moment plans to track the robbers down would pan out. But I couldn't focus.

I kept coming back to what Tattletale had said. I felt like I was making a friend in Shadow Stalker, but she only knew the girl in the bug costume who kept picking fights with Brockton Bay's underworld. I didn't know if she would even recognize Taylor Hebert.

I'd started out as a cape to try to make the city a better place. And to feel like I was doing something, and maybe find a part of my life that Emma couldn't ruin. I'd felt like things were going well socially, but I couldn't help but feel that it was based on a lie. And if I had been lying to myself about that, I didn't know if I could trust my judgment about other things. It did seem a little silly, to think that one person could really have an impact on the entire city.

"You ok?"

I came out of my thoughts and realized that I had instinctively drawn the swarm of bugs around me, hiding from sight. I dispersed them around the room and nodded to Shadow Stalker.

"Good. Fucking Undersiders," she said, gesturing angrily at the patch of darkness marking the hole in the wall she had used to enter.

I just stared at her blankly, which she took as an invitation to continue.

"That fucker who makes those shadows, that's what he calls his crew. They've been making a name for themselves boosting shit around town," she said. "Rumor has it they knocked over the Ruby Dreams casino, but I don't think he's that crazy. Their big thing is that they always get away clean, but we roughed them up a bit, right?"

"Yeah," I replied. "That girl in the dog mask-"

"Hellhound. She's the one who controls those dogs," Shadow Stalker interrupted. I must have started in surprise, prompting a chuckle. "I know, right? She can take a little chihuahua and pump it up into one of those tiger-lizard-rhino things."

"Anyway," I said, "she was in a skirt, so she took a lot of stings. She won't be walking for a while, I think."

"What about Grue?" She asked. "The one in the motorcycle gear."

"The bugs couldn't get to him through his costume," I replied, "but one of your shots got him in the shoulder."

"Good," she said, surprisingly vehement. "I told him I would make him bleed."

I was a little taken aback by that. She hadn't struck me as being so bloodthirsty before. On the other hand, after my experience with the Undersiders, I could see how they could inspire that kind of reaction.

"Tattletale pretty much got away scot free," I said, "and the other guy got stung some, but probably not enough to keep him off his feet. What's his deal, anyways?"

"Beats me," she said. "I've never seen him do anything. Grue wouldn't keep him around if he was just dead weight, though."

I thought back to the beginning of the fight. The figure lowering his hand once I was on the ground.

"I think he did something to knock me over," I said. "Maybe some kind of telekinesis?"

"Maybe," she said, shrugging. "We'll figure it out when we fuck them up."

I blinked, taken aback by her confidence. Tracking down the Undersiders was a non-trivial endeavor in and of itself. We had driven them off today-after they had the money they were looking for-but I wasn't sure I liked our odds if we cornered them and forced a fight. It was a little inspiring to hear Shadow Stalker talk as though it was just a matter of time, but also a little disconcerting when I didn't even know if we were going to keep working together.

"I thought you didn't want anything to do with me," I said, "after that thing with Armsmaster."

"Well, I've been thinking," she said. She paused and started pacing. I held my tongue, giving her time to gather her thoughts. I always hated it when people pestered me to talk.

"What I was doing before, it was comfortable. Go out, find some assholes, beat the hell out of 'em, rinse and repeat. I was in a groove, you know?" She said. "And those guys, they were really the scum of the earth, too. Like if the city is a big jungle, they're fucking scavengers. Hyenas, or jackals, or something, I don't know."

"But what does that make me, if all I do is go after the jackals? One step up from the lowest of the low? You broke me out of that," she said, a real note of enthusiasm creeping into her voice. "Taking out Oni Lee, that's like one of those big ass lions people put up on their wall as a trophy. It's a big league kind of move. If we work together, we could be on that kind of level all the time. Top of the food chain."

"Apex predators," I said, thinking of the giant hornets.

"Yeah," Shadow Stalker said, nodding. "I'm not saying I want to go pick a fight with Lung tonight, but I don't want to go back to beating up on a bunch of nobodies either."

"And the Protectorate?" I asked. Last week she had been pretty upset about getting on their bad side.

"Fucking sheep," she said. "I don't see them doing anything about Empire 88, so why should I care what they think? Did you see this bullshit?"

She reached under her cloak and pulled out a folded up square of paper from under her cloak. When she unfolded it, I immediately recognized it as a printout of a bulletin the PRT had put up on their web page, offering a five hundred dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of Shadow Stalker or "Skitter," the name the PRT had come up with for me. It was a little bit edgier than I wanted to go, but I had to admit that it sounded better than anything I had come up with.

I shook my head as I thought about the other thing I had noticed when I had looked at the web site.

"I thought about writing in to correct them about the he slash she thing."

Shadow Stalker threw back her head and laughed. It was nice to hear such a cheerful sound after such a stressful evening.

"Well, the photo they got could go either way," she said, holding out the paper so I could take a closer view. She kept talking-something about how the Protectorate would back off once Armsmaster's temper cooled off-but I wasn't listening.

The picture of "Skitter" was pretty androgynous. My guess is that it was from a camera on Armsmaster's suit somewhere, and it really didn't show more than the light reflecting off of the yellow lenses over my eyes, shining out from the middle of a massive swarm of bugs. I was focused farther down on the page, though.

When you print something from the web, some computers are set up to print out the network path on the bottom of each page. I'm no expert, but I didn't have to be to recognize a string of letters and symbols that I had seen on my own homework. Shadow Stalker was showing me a printout from the Winslow High computer lab. We went to school together.

Everything Tattletale had said came rushing back. I had entertained the hope that if Shadow Stalker and I had met somewhere without our masks on, we could have been friends. I had even considered taking off my mask, revealing my secret identity. This ended those ideas.

Obviously she knew who I was, and obviously we weren't friends: I didn't have any friends at Winslow. The best I could hope for if I revealed myself was pity, but I was more likely to experience the same kind of disdain that most of the students at Winslow had for me.

It was possible that she was a student in the years ahead of or below me. I found myself working through the list of girls at Winslow, trying to figure out who matched her height and build, but I shied away from that line of thinking. I didn't want to know who she was. If she was one of the students standing there, laughing as I was shoved into that locker... I didn't want to know.

"You all right? You got quiet."

I looked up and saw that she was looking at me with... well, I couldn't see her expression behind the hockey mask, but from her body language, she looked concerned. I shook my head.

"Just-just thinking about something Tattletale said." I had to fight to keep a quaver out of my voice.

Shadow Stalker reacted like I had told her about being shot.

"Wait, wait, she went after you?"

I nodded, not able to trust my voice.

"You know whatever she said is bullshit, right?"

I shook my head. "Some of the things she knew-"

"That's what she does. She finds your weak spot, then wraps some truth around a bunch of bullshit to get you doubting yourself," Shadow Stalker said. I had the impression she was speaking from experience. "She's at least a thinker seven or eight. And a bitch ten."

I couldn't help but chuckle at that. "You've met her before."

"Yeah," she said, sounding like her thoughts were a thousand miles away for a minute. "Yeah, I have. Trust me, she said what she said just to hurt you. You're better off just forgetting about it."

Maybe she was right. Did it matter that she wasn't friends with me outside of our costumes? For all I knew I wouldn't like her in her civilian identity either. Our powers were part of who we were. Maybe getting along as capes would be enough.

"Okay," I said, looking around for something to change the subject.

The room had been trashed. At some point the darkness over the hole in the wall had dissipated, allowing a clear view of the outside, and allowing in enough moonlight to illuminate the room. Big chunks of masonry were scattered around the room. The cockroaches had started putting a dent in the dead wasps, but there was still a layer of them covering the floor. Looking at the destruction, I was surprised the police hadn't shown up yet. I guess we had kept things relatively low key as far as cape fights went-sadly, in this neighborhood it was all too plausible that a single gunshot didn't rate a police investigation.

"I'm going to have to move," I said. Shadow Stalker took the hint and stepped back, looking around the room.

"I know a guy that might be able to help with that," she volunteered. I nodded in thanks.

"I think we ought to lay low for a little while longer. Empire 88 and the ABB are still on edge," I said. She nodded.

I didn't know if it had just been a coincidence that Oni Lee had been waiting for us on our second outing, but by now it was unlikely the gangs would be leaving any valuables around without parahuman backup. I didn't want to charge in to another parahuman fight until I was sure we could win. There was also the issue that any minute spent in costume was a minute that we risked being violently murdered by one or the other group of criminals.

I reached into the pouch in my costume and pulled out one of the disposable cell phones I had bought in case the evening went well. I couldn't really say it had been a good night overall, but at least things with Shadow Stalker seemed to be on solid footing. Whoever she was. I forced down my curiosity about her identity and tossed her the phone.

"I have a few ideas for tracking down the Undersiders in the mean time," I said. "I'll call you if I find anything solid."

She tucked the phone in her pocket, then gave me a thumbs up.

"Happy hunting."

For now, it was enough.

ooOoo

Benjamin Levine stifled a sigh as he opened up the manila folder on his desk. His legal practice kept him busy, but an abundance of delinquent payments kept him a little worried about paying the bills. One of the drawbacks of his choice in clientele was that they tended not to be very responsive to ordinary collection agencies. He was planning to spend his lunch hour figuring out which bills merited the attention of an extraordinary collection agency.

Some lawyers made their mark in court, winning judges and juries over to their side of an argument. Others specialized in putting deals together, either in the corporate boardroom or district attorney's office. Ben was more of a problem solver.

When the first wave of caped villains had hit Brockton Bay back in the eighties, they faced a lot of problems. A lot of young people had their hands on more cash than they knew what to do with, and Ben was happy to help them out. He soon proved to have a knack for helping them safeguard their money, find plausible ways to funnel it to their civilian identity, and manage all of the little details that went into maintaining a double life on the wrong side of the law.

Ben's clients weren't exactly the type who would pose for a photograph he could put up in his office, but word got around. A lawyer who could get along with people, who knew the right person to call to deal with any given situation, who knew when to keep his mouth shut... a lawyer like that could make a pretty decent living.

Compared to his heyday, Ben knew he could stand to lose a few pounds. He had more grey than black in his hair now, and the smile lines in his face seemed to be etched a little deeper every day, but his mind was as sharp as ever. As he often explained to his clients, one advantage of getting old was that you eventually saw just about every kind of trouble that a person could get into, and figured out how to deal with it.

He was running his finger down a line of figures when an ant scurried across the page. Irritated, he flicked it off his desk, only to start backwards as a cockroach dropped onto his desk from above. He looked up to see a mass of bugs nearly covering his ceiling.

Ah. So today was the day. He leaned forward and hit the intercom button on his phone.

"Maddy, be a doll and cancel my one o'clock."

"Already on it, Mr. L." The cheerful voice of his secretary crackled through the speaker before he cut the connection.

The bugs came pouring down off the ceiling, piling up on the floor. Those among them that could fly formed a swirling screen that blocked off his view of the rest of his office. They soon parted to reveal a costumed figure standing before his desk.

Her costume certainly fit the insect theme. The bodysuit utilized what looked like insect shells for armor plating, a design that was echoed on her mask with mandible-like jaw protection. The cut out goggles over her eyes finished the look, giving her an alien appearance. There was something else, too.

It took Ben a second to place it-it was a detail he wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't spent most of his adult life working with people in costumes-the girl in front of him was young. A teenager at the outside. She was thin in a way that very few adults ever managed, and her limbs had the slightly awkward proportions of somebody who probably had one more growth spurt to come. Combined with the rest of her costume, it enhanced the impression that she was slightly inhuman.

He thought about commenting on the fact that she was skipping school for this meeting, but decided against it. Most capes responded badly to speculation about their secret identities. She might decide to tell him who she was eventually, but that kind of thing called for a light touch.

The girl-Skitter according to the PRT-stood silently as he sized her up. It looked like she was waiting for him to make the first move. He spread his arms wide and gave her his best grandfatherly smile (it had been a sad day when he realized that his ladykilling grin had turned into a grandfatherly smile, but he tried to make the best of the situation).

"Sit, sit, relax," he gestured at the chair he kept in his office for visitors. She sat down, but her posture didn't really change-she was perched on the chair, ready to launch into fight or flight at the drop of a hat. "So what can I do for you?"

"I need to buy a place," she said. Her voice was flat, not carrying any of the excitement most capes showed after their first big score.

"Before we begin, do you have a dollar bill you could hand over?" Ben asked. She cocked her head at him quizzically before reaching behind her back and pulling out a dollar, setting it on the desk. Ben snagged the bill, folding it before tucking it in the inner pocket of his jacket. "I always like to be clear about these things. Now that you've officially retained my services as your lawyer, our conversation falls under the protection of the attorney-client privilege. Anything we say will be between you, me, and your little friends."

She relaxed a little bit at that, although she still didn't look truly at ease.

"That said, I don't get the impression you're trying to find a starter home here," Ben continued. "What exactly is it that you're looking for?"

"A lair, I guess," she said, sounding a little embarassed. "I need a place that nobody knows about, where I have some space for my... little friends."

Ben smiled. He always got a kick out of working with the capes who were just starting out.

"Ok, that's something I can help you out with," he said. "Usually with somebody in your situation I recommend you lease instead of buy. Once you reach a certain scope you have to buy-you don't see too many private islands, skull shaped mountains, or inactive volcanoes come up for rent-but I don't think that's what you're looking for anyways."

He chuckled, while she just stared at him. Tough crowd.

"The thing is, when you buy property there's a lot of paperwork. Some of it has to be filed with the government. There are steps you can take to hide what's going on, but it's hard to slip anything public past all the Thinkers out there these days," he continued. "A lease, on the other hand, is just between you and your landlord. Nobody else even has to know it exists. You get a five year lease with a landlord who has a hands-off kind of attitude, and you might as well own the place anyway."

"And you know some landlords with the right attitude," she said, tilting her head slightly. He nodded, pleased that she was catching on. "And the gangs and the Protectorate, don't they know who those landlords are?"

"They know some of them. Renting from somebody who's off the radar will cost a little more, but I think for you it would be well worth it," Ben said. "The lease would actually be held by a corporation, which would be owned by another set of corporations, which would be owned by another corporation, and so on. Ultimately the stock would be held in the name of my secretary. She would never do anything with it, and you'd have free use of the building without anybody knowing you're there."

There was a pause, and then he coughed into his hand. "There is the matter of your price range..."

In lieu of a verbal reply, she reached down to the mass of bugs on the floor beside her chair. The bugs boiled away, revealing a gym bag, which she lifted up into her lap. She unzipped the top and tilted it so that Ben could see that it was nearly filled with neatly banded packets of cash, then zipped it shut and set it back down.

Ben raised an eyebrow. That was a neat trick with the bugs. Had the bag always been there, or had they carried it in somehow? He dismissed the thought and turned back to his own area of expertise.

"That certainly ought to be enough to find something to suit your needs, although it does bring up another topic. Even the more open-minded landlords are going to be a little concerned if you pay your rent in cash," Ben said. "Fortunately, I know a guy that can help out with that. If you want to leave the money with me I can have him move it into a numbered account in one of the many small countries that have favorable privacy laws. Then you can use that account to spend money via wire transfers or money orders, just like every other business out there."

The girl looked at him for a long minute, and he had the distinct impression she was frowning. "You mean like money laundering?"

He leaned back, waving his hands in denial.

"Whoa, whoa, let's not start throwing around loaded terms here. This is just basic asset security, putting your money somewhere safe where you can still have access to it when you need it," he said. "Money laundering would be if we set up some mechanism to allow you to use the money in your civilian life. A fake job, an inheritance from a fictional relative, something like that. Which brings up my next question..."

"What? No. My-no," she said, shaking her head. "This money is just for cape stuff."

"Ok, ok, that makes my job easier," Ben said, making a mental note. She was keeping a firm separation between her caped life and her personal life. It wasn't uncommon, although capes on the wrong side of the law often had to give up that kind of thing over time. "As long as we're tackling delicate subjects, I should mention that different locations might be more or less appropriate depending on the likelihood that there will be narcotics, firearms, or stolen goods on the premises."

"Of course there won't be," she snapped, standing up from the chair. "What do you think I am, some kind of criminal?"

The bugs crawling over her costume and in the air started moving faster, darting around erratically. Ben couldn't tell if it was a conscious or unconscious display of anger, but either way it served as a reminder that most parahumans were never truly unarmed.

"Hey, hey, relax. I'm your lawyer. I'm on your side," he said, holding up a hand in placating fashion. "I'm not here to judge your choices or tell you what to do. That's not my job. But it is my job to try to spot potential trouble in your future and warn you about it. And in my experience, when bags like that show up in the office, they weren't filled up by somebody acting strictly within the bounds of the law."

Skitter seemed to deflate as the righteous anger drained out of her and she sat back down.

"I guess it's stolen," she said, looking down at her hands. "But from bad people! And there won't be any drugs or guns around."

"Ok, ok, good to know," Ben said, digging a pad up from under his desk and writing a few notes to himself. "I think that's enough for me to get started. Leave me a way to get in touch and I'll let you know when I've found a few places to choose from. If you want to leave the cash to be deposited that's great, otherwise I'm going to need my fee up front."

"What?" Skitter asked. "The whole thing?"

"Yeah. We can switch over to working on a deposit once I'm sure you're going to live out the week," Ben said, sighing. "Word is Lung has sworn some kind of blood oath to avenge Oni Lee's death, and Kaiser is offering six figures for your head on a pike. You have a real knack for stirring up trouble."

She looked him in the eye. "But lucky for me, you're not the type to sell somebody out for a hundred thousand dollars?"

"I'm not the type to help Kaiser out," Ben said, flatly, then smiled. "Besides, if I started telling tales out of school, you wouldn't even be the fifth client in line to shut me up permanently."

"Fair enough," she said, then stood. "As long as we're having a frank discussion, I suppose there's something I ought to say. I've noticed, since I've had my powers, a lot of people try to bug proof their homes or their clothes. It works ok, I guess, to protect against bugs who are following their natural instincts. But it's just about impossible to protect against everything that bugs are really capable of. And I don't have a problem overriding their instincts."

All of the bugs in the room leapt into action. They formed up, not into the inchoate swarm that had delivered Skitter into the room, but in a complex series of interlocking three dimensional geometric shapes. The whole production gradually rotated around Skitter, who kept her eyes locked on his throughout the demonstration. She seemed a little surprised when he threw his head back and laughed.

"I like you, kid. You got style. Your secrets are safe with me," he said, mentally moving her to the third or fourth spot in his internal list of clients most likely to kill him if provoked. "Cash up front."

ooOoo

AN: With all due respect to Mr. Calle, sometimes you need a criminal lawyer, and sometimes you need a _criminal_ lawyer.


	5. Chapter 5

AN: As always, I love hearing what worked for people and what didn't. I try not to be annoying about it, but I do read and appreciate every review, and hearing from readers helps motivate me to keep writing.

ooOoo

I had a head start on tracking the Undersiders, thanks to a moment of personal weakness. I hadn't mentioned it to Shadow Stalker; even if it had turned out to be useful in our pursuit of criminals, I didn't want to admit that I had done something so petty. Not that I had really done anything wrong, per se.

It was only natural that I thought about retaliating against my tormentors once I had a decent handle on my powers. There were practical problems. Any kind of overt attack could only end with the PRT hauling me off to prison. A more subtle approach might hurt them without any proof leading back to me, but they hardly needed any proof to take their bad luck out on me. There was no way to bring them down without bringing trouble down on my own head. More than that, though, I didn't want to use my power like that. I didn't want to go straight from being a victim of bullies to being a bully myself.

That didn't mean I couldn't dream about it, or make preparations for a revenge I knew in my heart I would never carry out. To that end, one of the terrariums in my old lair had a special colony of head lice. Once I had established an environment where they could breed, I had started exposing them to small amounts of the more popular lice treatments. Thanks to their quick life cycle and my ability to push the pace on their reproduction, they had started showing decent resistance after the first month. Not that I would ever actually sic them on anybody at school... probably.

I had used some of my flying insects as a delivery mechanism to drop the lice on the Undersiders. It was an act of petty revenge, yes, but it was more than that: my forced breeding program had resulted in physical changes in my subjects. It was pretty subtle-the kind of thing that would take a microscope and a dedicated entomologist to spot-but my power gave me instinctive knowledge of the physical state of every bug under my control. I was pretty sure I would be able to recognize my lice if I came across them in public.

I hadn't managed to tag Grue or Tattletale, but I had hit the other two. I had to hope that the four of them met regularly, and finding one would let me find them all. And that they weren't too particular about their hygiene.

For the week after the attack, I left for the Docks as soon as school ended. I was able to spend a few hours there before I had to head home for dinner with my dad. Some days I would wander up and down the boardwalk, and others I would just sit and do my homework at one of the many coffee shops that dotted the area. I could easily afford to hang out at even the overpriced touristy places, now. I was lucky Shadow Stalker had had my share of our take from the ABB in her safekeeping when I had my little run in with the Undersiders.

Arranging for a new lair had put a dent in my funds, but there was still plenty left for Mr. Levine to disappear into an account somewhere. It was amazing how money could make life easier. My new place was an old warehouse located in the area of the Docks on the fuzzy boundary between "Boardwalk adjacent" and "gang controlled no-go zone." The fee I had paid included a move-in service that had a team of men sweep out any vagrants-I could have done it, but a team of Boardwalk enforcers was certainly less conspicuous than a swarm of insects-and leave a pallet of terrariums behind.

Getting my new place set up was the other big item on my to do list. I had temporarily stashed my more valuable insects in our basement, and I was anxious to get them away from anywhere my dad might stumble on them. Fortunately, my power let me move a lot of insects using just my backpack. Being able to forego any kind of safety gear came in pretty handy there.

The exotic bugs had settled in to their new location without much hassle. Setting up the terrariums was actually kind of fun, and part of me just wanted to focus on moving forward in my new location and forget about the Undersiders.

It was the part of me that kept me from fighting back against the bullies at school. If anything, the situation here was even more favorable for inaction: I was working out of a new location now, one that would be much harder for them to find. If I just kept my head down there was every chance that I could avoid ever interacting with the Undersiders again.

But I hadn't put on my costume just to knuckle under to a new set of bullies. Part of the reason that I never fought back in school was because there was no chance of winning; Emma always manipulated the situation so that fighting back would just make things worse. This was different: even when the Undersiders had been prepared for me I had been able to make them uncomfortable; if Shadow Stalker and I could take them by surprise, we had a real chance of victory.

Besides, it wasn't like "Skitter" could choose to take a cautious career track at this point, anyways. Empire 88 and the Azn Bad Boys already wanted to kill me. Was it really worth sacrificing my self-respect just to keep from adding the Undersiders to that list?

So I kept my vigil on the Boardwalk. It had occurred to me that the rumors that the Undersiders were based out of the Docks might be wrong, but I didn't have much else to go on. It wasn't like I had a car I could use to search the whole city. Besides, the boardwalk was by far the nicest part of the city to keep watch on. Even if they weren't based out of the area, they might decide to stop by for coffee or something. In the meantime, at least I was comfortable while I kept watch.

My persistence-and laziness-was rewarded when I sensed somebody walking down the street outside with head lice. A quick status check confirmed that they were my special breed. Unless they had practiced some seriously poor hygiene and started spreading the lice already, one of the Undersiders was headed in my direction. I started packing up my homework, wanting to be ready to leave the coffee shop once my target had walked by.

I figured he would walk by because he was showing no signs of turning or even slowing down as he moved along the Boardwalk. I finished putting my papers in my backpack as he closed in from a block away to a half block away, then to within twenty feet of the coffee shop. I was surprised when he turned to walk into the shop, and I couldn't keep myself from looking up as two boys walked into the store.

One of them was obviously the Undersider who favored the Renaissance Faire look. His curly black hair was a dead giveaway. He looked younger than I expected-probably a year or two younger than me. He was handsome, if a little too pretty for my tastes, and he was chatting animatedly with his companion.

His friend was more of a man than a boy. He stood six feet tall, and wore his hair in neat cornrows; together with his dark complexion, they made him stand out even more than his height and build would usually warrant. Brockton Bay's status as the unofficial Neo-Nazi capital of America had been tough on the minority population.

Not that his build was anything to sneeze at. He didn't have the overdeveloped musculature of a bodybuilder or of some of the more extreme capes out there, but he did have a certain solidity about him. Functional muscle, the kind of strength you develop when you work with your hands for a living. Shifting my gaze from his shoulders to his face I realized he was looking right at me. He grinned as our eyes met-a surprisingly boyish expression, it made him look years younger-and I immediately dropped my eyes to the table, feeling my cheeks heat up under his scrutiny.

This was embarrassing. I was supposed to be here to track down the Undersiders. Not to ogle their surprisingly attractive friends. Their friends who were clearly out of my league. Huffing a little, I finished packing my things and made my way out of the store. I didn't look over at the Undersider on the way out, partly because I didn't want to draw attention to myself, partly because I couldn't bear it if they were laughing at the idea of me thinking I had a chance with one of them.

I did make sure to tag them both with a mosquito on the small of the back and on the shoulder. With two points of reference I would be able to tell which way they were facing as long as they were within my range.

Once I was outside I turned to walk the direction the Undersider and his friend had come from. Roughly a block from the coffee shop, there was a bench facing the ocean. I settled down to enjoy the view for a little while and waited for them to move. Fortunately they seemed to be getting their coffee to go, as they didn't stay in the coffee shop for long. I stood once they were outside, and tried to match my pace to theirs as I continued along the Boardwalk.

The plan was pretty simple. As long as I stayed approximately a block away from them, there was no danger that any of the bugs I was using for tracking would leave the range of my power. I figured they were unlikely to see me from that distance, given the normal foot traffic on the boardwalk. And even if they did see me, they would hardly suspect that somebody walking in front of them was trying to follow them home. I wouldn't even have to turn to look at them to know when they turned off the boardwalk.

They didn't stay on the boardwalk long, turning off after about ten minutes of walking. I hung out by the next intersection and let them get about halfway to the next street before I walked off the boardwalk myself. I didn't want them to catch a glimpse of me through some random gap in the buildings or at cross streets, and the additional distance still left them well within my range.

We were a couple blocks inland when the two guys I was following split up. The Undersider kept walking deeper into the Docks, while his friend turned down the street and headed in my direction. Fortunately, we were still in the relatively nice near-boardwalk area, so there was a little touristy store that I was able to duck inside. I browsed through the dresses on the rack without really seeing them while I waited for the coast to clear.

It was a little nerve wracking, waiting for him to walk past my position. I knew, intellectually, there was no way he could have seen me, but I still couldn't totally suppress the irrational fear that I had been spotted. I was also a little torn over how to react to their separation. I was a little disappointed that it looked like I had only found one Undersider rather than two, but it was a relief not to have to think of somebody with such a nice smile as a criminal. Not that anything was certain, but obviously they were less likely to be in the same gang if they didn't go back to some shared lair together.

By the time he had moved about a half block past the intersection, the Undersider I was tracking was just about to the edge of my range. I left the store and walked briskly to try to make up some of the distance. As I did, the neighborhood changed around me.

It's kind of amazing how quickly the Docks can go from the nicest area in town to one of the most dangerous. The boardwalk was a major source of tourist revenue, and a constant focus of development and law enforcement efforts. There was a little bit of spillover to the nearby area, but the bulk of the Docks was a sort of graveyard of modern industry, packed with warehouses and factories that had been the economic heart of the city back when Brockton Bay was a major hub of commerce. These days the major function of these buildings was to ameliorate Brockton Bay's homeless problem by providing shelter for vagrants who would otherwise be in the streets. It also served as a major breeding ground for crime, and we were starting to get into the rougher part of the neighborhood.

I gathered some of the local flying pests and sent them discreetly out around me, marking everybody nearby. It was a little early for gang members to start indulging in violent crimes, but it was just common sense to avoid groups of idle young men at any time of day. With a couple blocks of warning it was easy enough to arrange to be on the other side of the street from anybody who seemed suspicious.

I followed my target through the twists and turns of the Docks, never letting him get any closer than a block away from me. I was just starting to get nervous-we were pretty deep into the bad part of the neighborhood, and I did want to get home safely in time for dinner-when I felt it. Up ahead, another set of head lice that felt like my special breed. I ducked into a doorway and waited. Sure enough, the boy I was tracking headed straight for the same building I was sensing the lice from.

I had found the home of at least two of the Undersiders.

ooOoo

I spent the next week getting a feel for the place and planning out our next steps. I had to be careful-Tattletale could pull information seemingly out of nowhere, and details on all of the Undersiders were frustratingly hard to come by-during the day, I didn't direct any of the bugs inside at all. I could get a feel for the place based on their natural actions, though it was frustrating being unable to see through my swarm's eyes.

I only saw the building myself once. We had one of those beautiful sunny spring days that was still chilly enough to justify wearing a sweatshirt. I took advantage by donning a hoodie and sunglasses and jogging past the lair. Seeing the "Redmond Welding" sign on the building didn't give me any additional information about the interior layout, but I felt better having seen it with my own eyes.

I did manage to sneak out one evening to get a better picture of the place. It felt kind of nice to put on my costume again, though I still did my best to stay unseen as I jogged through the empty streets. It was late by the time I reached the abandoned factory, and from what I could tell from the bugs inside the Undersiders were already asleep.

I waited a little while to be sure that nobody was moving around, then started using the cockroaches already living in the building to map out its interior. Not in the kind of numbers that would give me a real-time three dimensional picture-that would be a foolish risk to take-but enough that I could sketch a decent map of the place in my notebook.

I also used individual spiders to confirm what I already suspected: the third Undersider living in the building was Tattletale, unless Grue was concealing some seriously long hair under that helmet. I had noticed during my daytime observations that there only seemed to be three people who actually lived in the building.

I didn't want to be too aggressive trying to track Grue down; tipping off Tattletale would be disastrous. I had spotted a fourth person in the building a couple of times, but there wasn't enough of a pattern to their behavior-or I just wasn't able to spend enough time to find it-for me to feel comfortable putting together a plan for a daytime attack.

The safer play would be to go in at night. We'd figure out how to deal with Grue when the time came.

ooOoo

Shadow Stalker, despite what her name might suggest, was not particularly patient when it came to standing around outside in the middle of the night. I could sense her fidgeting through the bugs I had deposited on her costume even before she spoke up.

"He's still playing video games?"

She had to already know the answer to that question. I was getting continuous feedback on the location of the Undersiders' night owl, and I would have told her if anything had changed. I glanced over in a futile effort to read her body language-we were crouched on the roof across the street from the Undersider's lair, and with the low ambient lighting she wasn't visible as more than a dark blob.

"It's almost like he doesn't realize tomorrow is a school day," I said, my nerves coming out in a bit of testiness. For all the advantages we had, this was still the first time I had deliberately picked a fight with any other parahuman, let alone a whole team.

Shadow Stalker snorted, then rose from her crouching position and began pacing back and forth. There was a muffled clinking noise every time she turned around, courtesy of the temporary addition to her arsenal. Mr. Levine had been amused when I asked about getting our hands on some chloroform. Apparently knockout drug technology advanced dramatically when tinkers showed up on the scene.

A small deduction from our bank accounts had procured the delivery of an innocuous looking aerosol can. Placing the attached plastic mask over somebody's nose and mouth before dispensing some of its contents would leave your target unconscious for four hours or until administered the antidote. I found it a little unsettling that such a thing was available for purchase, but I did appreciate that my lawyer was confident enough of my good intentions that he didn't ask what I was planning to do with it.

"When this is over, you want to go back to hitting Empire Eighty-Eight?" Shadow Stalker asked.

"Yeah," I replied, a little distracted by the need to keep a metaphorical eye on the Undersiders. "I figure they'll let their guard down a little bit since we haven't hit them in a while. Even if we do screw up and run into a cape, at least it won't be Lung."

"You don't even think about backing down, do you?"

I looked up at her, surprised at the question. I wasn't sure if her tone had been more bemused or more concerned. Looking at her didn't clear anything up. It was always hard to read her body language in costume, and in the dark of the night it was impossible.

"Kaiser is a bully who's used to getting what he wants. Bullies don't back off until you make them back off," I said, then paused. I decided that if what I was about to say sounded like an accusation, it was one she invited. "You sounded like you were on board last week."

"I guess finding out somebody actually put a price on my head made everything seem real serious all of a sudden," she replied.

I took a minute to gather my thoughts. My first thought when I learned about the bounty was that it was a sign that what we were doing was having an effect. It was funny to think that we could interpret the same fact so differently.

"All the more reason to keep going. What's he going to do, pay somebody to kill us twice? He didn't leave himself a lot of room for escalation," I said. "The way to get rid of the bounty is to make it so that Kaiser can't afford to pay it. We were never going to take down Empire Eighty-Eight without making serious enemies."

"Maybe you're right," Shadow Stalker said. She started pacing for a bit, then stopped and kicked at the roof. "Fuck! I can't believe the people in this town wear fucking Nazi tattoos right out in the open."

I shared the sentiment, and I was about to say so when I was distracted by movement from inside.

"He's moving," I said, holding up a hand. "He's... going to bed."

"Finally!" Shadow Stalker said, obviously excited at the prospect of getting off the roof. "You got all the creepy crawlies ready?"

"They've been in position for a while," I replied. "But we're not moving in for fifteen minutes. Do you really want any of them to be awake when we kick this off?"

"Yeah, yeah," she grumbled, but settled down in a crouch.

For the next fifteen minutes there was none of the idle chitchat that had marked the rest of our stakeout. Shadow Stalker was staring at the building across the street with an intensity that was almost frightening. I didn't want to distract her while she was getting herself psyched up, so the time passed in silence.

The head lice on the last Undersider to bed had stopped moving ten minutes in. I was pretty sure he had already fallen asleep, but I figured it was better to be safe than sorry, so I waited the full fifteen minutes before I gave my minions the go-ahead.

The bugs that I had gathered in the gaps between the walls in the Undersiders hideout each headed to the nearest power cord and started chewing with abandon. Many of them died as they came into contact with live current, but each bite eroded the wires just a little bit more, and it wasn't long before the wires were all severed.

"All clear."

Shadow Stalker didn't say anything in response; she didn't even look over at me as she ran forward and launched herself into the air. As soon as her feet left the roof she transitioned into her shadow form. Even knowing she was there I could barely see her as she drifed across the street and through the wall into our target building.

I did my best to keep an track of what was going on inside as I headed for the fire escape and made my way back to ground level. It was tough: Shadow Stalker was frequently shifting between her solid and shadow state, which made it hard to keep a bug on her consistently. I could have flooded the interior of the building with bugs, but that would have been counterproductive. I needed to be ready to help out if needed, but I didn't want to risk waking our targets prematurely.

Fortunately for my peace of mind, it was all over quickly. By the time I was walking across the street, Shadow Stalker had gone solid and was dragging the unconscious bodies of the Undersiders out into their common area. So far, so good.

I walked around to the back of the factory and pulled a length of cord from my utility pouch. After my little adventure at the zoo it had seemed like a handy kind of thing to keep around. I held one end up in the air where it was grasped by a helpful group of flies. They carried it up, looped the end over the bottom rung of the ladder attached to the fire escape, and brought it back down to me.

I had to hang onto both ends of the loop and jump up and down a few times before the ladder finally moved. It came down with a screech of metal and shower of rust-whether through neglect or design, it would have been impossible to sneak into the building this way. I clambered up the ladder and headed for the roof.

By the time I got there, Shadow Stalker had just finished tying up the last of our three temporary prisoners. There was a small rooftop garden up here, complete with outdoor furniture. Each of the Undersiders was tied to one of the wrought iron chairs that, together with a round table, had provided a place to sit and admire the garden during the daytime.

The Undersiders looked surprisingly young, tied up and unconscious as they were. I had seen the boy before, and pictures of Hellhound were readily available on the internet, but this was my first chance to see Tattletale unmasked. She was solidly on the pretty side of the pretty to normal spectrum, and a splash of freckles across the bridge of her nose that were incongruously cute. It reminded me of Madison, and the way she could look like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth while she told our teachers lie after lie about me.

"Let's get this started," Shadow Stalker said, snapping me out of my memories.

She walked over to the bound form of Hellhound and hit her with the wake up spray. The effect was immediate as her head snapped up to glare at my partner.

"I think we're out of range of your dogs," Shadow Stalker said. "But I want to be clear."

She was standing just inside the personal space of the bound Undersiders. We had agreed ahead of time that she would handle the talking; I was a little shy around new people, even when I hadn't just helped drag them out of bed and tie them up. Shadow Stalker had positioned the chairs along the edge of the rooftop garden, while I hung back and sat on the table. I had deposited bugs all over our prisoners so I would be alerted if they tried to move.

"If one of your little pets shows up, here's what's going to happen. You'll die, of course," Shadow Stalker continued, gesturing with the crossbow that had just appeared in her hand. "Then I'll go home, get a good night's sleep. Maybe get a mani-pedi tomorrow, get my hair done."

This was the point where I would have faltered under the death glare Hellhound was directing at my partner.

"Then I'll track down every dog you've ever owned, once your power has time to wear off, and kill them. Slowly," Shadow Stalker continued, with no trace of the teasing tone that had been in her voice earlier. "Do you understand me?"

"Fuck. You."

"Hey, it doesn't have to be like that," Shadow Stalker replied. "I don't really have anything against you personally. Grue's the one I want. Tell me where to find him and you'll be free to go."

We were hoping to set them against each other to try and get them to tell us where to find Grue. In Shadow Stalker's experience, most criminals were perfectly happy to have somebody else go to prison in their place.

"Fuck you."

Hellhound didn't seem at all interested in the opportunity to buy her freedom. Shadow Stalker was unfazed, patting her on the cheek before pulling a hood over her head.

"Think it over. We'll be making this offer to your teammates too," she said. "First come, first served."

The curly-haired boy was the next one she woke up. I still didn't even know his cape name. I sent a command to the bugs in the room below to crawl through his room and try to find anything that could be an id, or at least his wallet. While I was at it, I had the bugs in the rest of the apartment start looking for any cash they kept on hand.

His reaction to being woken up was more subdued. I saw him blink a couple of times before his eyes settled on Shadow Stalker.

"Is this some kind of foreplay?" He asked, a lazy smile coming to his face. "Because I would give you an A for effort and creativity, but I'd have to take points off for being just a little bit rapey."

"Maybe in a few years, kid," Shadow Stalker said, ruffling his hair. He flinched away from her touch, his cool facade momentarily cracking. "For now, though, I just want to know where Grue is. Tell me and I'll let you go."

"So you're just using me to get to my friend?" He asked, the bored expression back in place. "Tempting, but I'm going to have to decline."

"Think about it," she replied, pulling another hood from under her cloak and putting it over his head. "All three of you are getting the offer, the first one to take it is the only one who gets to go."

That left only Tattletale. Neither of us had been looking forward to this conversation. She had a way of getting under your skin, no matter the situation. If Shadow Stalker was feeling any nervousness now, she wasn't showing it; she carried herself with her usual confidence as she walked over and woke up the last of the Undersiders.

"I-mmph!" Whatever Tattletale was going to say was cut off as Shadow Stalker stuffed a gag into her mouth. Once it was secure she stepped back and glared at Tattletale.

"I don't like you. But I like Grue even less," Shadow Stalker said. "You tell me where he is, you can go. You got anything to say?"

Tattletale nodded, and Shadow Stalker stepped forward and took the gag out of her mouth.

"You're having trouble finding Grue, huh?" Tattletale asked. Shadow Stalker didn't reply, but Tattletale reacted as if she had nodded. "So all I have to do is keep my mouth shut and he'll have us out on the street in a week? Gee, tough call-ack!"

Once more, Shadow Stalker had cut her off mid sentence by stuffing the gag into her mouth.

"I wouldn't be so sure that Grue's riding to the rescue," she said. "Besides, you might only be facing juvie, but I don't think your teammates will be so lucky. I'll give you some time to think it over."

She fastened some improvised earplugs on Tattletale before pulling another hood over her face. Tattletale wasn't the kind of enemy that you could allow to get any extra information. With that complete, Shadow Stalker turned and walked back over to me.

"Might as well call the PRT now," she said softly once she was close. "They're not going to crack after that little pep talk."

"Is she right?" I asked. "Will Grue really be able to get them out?"

Shadow Stalker paused before answering. I could see her shoulders slump slightly as she came to a conclusion.

"Maybe," she said. "The Protectorate hasn't done a great job keeping guys like Uber and Leet off the streets. It won't help if their leader is still out and about, for sure."

I felt a chill run down my spine. We had the upper hand right now, but I knew I'd be lying to myself if I didn't admit that the Undersiders were fully capable of beating us in a fight. Any confrontation in the future would turn on who got the drop on who. I may have gotten the better of her this time, but I didn't want to get into an information gathering contest with Tattletale.

"So that's it?" I asked, disappointed. "They turn down the deal and we just give up?"

"What did you have in mind?" She asked. "You want to rough them up a little, encourage them to talk?"

She sounded more amused than offended by the idea. I still just shrugged in response. I felt bad about hurting somebody who couldn't fight back, but if he alternative was looking over my shoulder all the time once the Undersiders were back on the streets? I'd rather feel a little guilty than a lot of pain when a giant dog tackled me out of nowhere.

"The problem with that is we aren't exactly going to get in the PRT's good books if we hand over prisoners who have obviously been worked over," she said. "I'm not saying I've never dangled somebody off a building to get them to talk, but you can't bluff Tattletale like that. The other two are stone psychos. They're not going to talk unless we do some serious damage."

"Really?" I asked, gesturing at the boy. There was definitely something off about Hellhound, but he had seemed so normal.

"I know he's a weedy little guy, but he has the dead eyes," Shadow Stalker said, shaking her head. "If he doesn't have a dismembered hooker in his fridge, it's just because he's too lazy to saw up a body."

I blinked. That was surprisingly graphic. I didn't think I could second-guess her assessment of the Undersiders; she had more experience with criminal types than I did. Still, I didn't want to just give up. Besides, I knew from personal experience that you could hurt somebody a lot without inflicting any physical pain.

"Hellhound, what about her dogs?" I asked.

"Are you kidding?" Shadow Stalker replied. "If we start threatening them right in front of her we're going to have a giant mutant dog on our hands."

"Her power only works if the dog is alive."

The silence that followed seemed to stretch on for hours.

"No," Shadow Stalker finally said, quietly but with intensity. "We're not turning this into a full on blood feud."

I let out a sigh that was half frustration and half relief. I didn't want to hurt an innocent animal, but I really didn't want to have to fight the Undersiders again.

"What about Tattletale?" I said, waving down Shadow Stalker's objection. "I know we can't bluff her, but who says we have to bluff?"

"The PRT-" she said, but I interrupted.

"They picked a fight with me," I said. "It's only natural they'd pick up a few stings for their troubles."

She only hesitated for a second before she nodded. I started off by taking the canister of knockout gas from her and heading over to administer a dose to Hellhound and the little guy. No sense letting Tattletale pass on any more messages to her team.

When they were safely unconscious I tossed the canister back to Shadow Stalker and crouched down in front of Tattletale. Steeling myself, I reached out and removed her hood, then her gag and ear coverings. She was speaking almost before the gag was out of her mouth.

"You can't seriously think that we-"

"New deal," I interrupted. "You tell us where Grue is, and I stop."

I held up my hand, directing one of the bullet ants I had brought with me to walk over my outstretched finger. I saw her eyes widen in recognition, and the questioning expression on her face turned to one of condemnation.

"You wouldn't," Tattletale said, for the first time sounding unsure. "That's crossing the line."

Crossing the line. That was an expression I was familiar with. Emma, Madison, and Sophia could pile petty humiliation on top of petty humiliation, doing everything in their power to ruin my life. But it was all fine, as long as they didn't cross the line. Of course, if I ever fought back-even just giving in to the temptation to punch Emma in the mouth-that would be over the line.

I felt a surge of anger buttress the fear and sense of self-preservation I had been relying on to get me through this.

"I didn't notice a line when you were holding a gun to my head." I said, directing the ant to leap off of my finger. Once it landed it was easy to direct it to an exposed foot. Shadow Stalker had tied one of her feet to each of the legs of the chair, and there wasn't enough play in the ropes for Tattletale to do anything about the ant crawling on her.

"You-you don't want to do this," Tattletale said, focusing intently on my face. "You want to be a hero, don't you? Like Alexandria. What would she think of this?"

Like every other little girl, I had gone through an Alexandria phase as a kid. She was one of the strongest heroes in the world: able to fly faster than the speed of sound, hit an Endbringer hard enough to knock it over, and so invulnerable to harm that she could live to do it again.

Alexandria had also been a major force behind the founding of the Protectorate, an organization dedicated to the principle that parahumans were subject to the same rules as everybody else. What I was doing here, going outside of the law to accomplish my goals, it was against everything Alexandria stood for.

I bowed my head. I had known, as soon as I understood my powers, that I was no Alexandria. I couldn't go toe to toe with an Endbringer and expect to walk away. But I could clean up Brockton Bay. I could attack the problems that were beneath the notice of the big time heroes. I just couldn't do it if I had to live up to their example.

"You're right," I said. "I don't want to do this."

Then I had the ant sting her, right on the top of her foot.

I saw an expression of disbelief flutter across her face, right before her features twisted up in pain. She didn't scream, but she couldn't hold back the hissing noise as she seemed to expel all of the air in her body in one long, pained, exhale. It felt strangely intimate, but I forced myself not to look away.

"Where is Grue?" I asked, once she had focused her attention back on me.

"Right behind you," she said.

I didn't have to look to know it was a lie. I had enough bugs stationed around the perimeter of the roof to know that nobody was getting up here without me noticing.

I had the ant sting her again. The venom from the first sting would still be affecting her-would be for the next twenty-four hours, really-but the more venom that was pumped into her system, the more pain she would feel. It would take a truly absurd number of stings before the venom would reach lethal levels. As much as I hated this situation, the ant really was the perfect tool for the job.

She did cry out this time, a high pitched keening that grated on my ears. She was crying, too, tears leaking from her eyes and mixing with the snot draining from her nose. Overall, it was jarring change from the confident mien she usually carried about her. Part of me felt guilty about bringing her to this, while a darker part of me felt a sort of triumph at bringing somebody who had attacked me to such a state. I suppressed both feelings, focusing on my swarm and on the girl in front of me. This wasn't about my personal hang ups-this was something I had to do.

"Tell me," I said, "or this is going to get worse."

Head hanging loosely from her neck, no longer looking me in the eyes, she gave an address.

I paused and looked at her for a moment. I had assumed this would take a lot more than two stings. It was possible I was underestimating the level of pain the ants could cause-they had picked up their nickname because their stings were comparable to getting hit with a bullet, after all-but this still seemed a little too quick.

"If my partner finds a trap when she checks the place out," I said, doing my best to keep my voice level, "we won't be taking things one sting at a time when we start over."

Another long moment passed. I knew that even now she must be in a tremendous amount of pain. There was no realistic hope of rescue; they had probably chosen this area of the Docks as their home base specifically because it was off the beaten path. Nobody was going to stumble onto us, and whatever failsafe they had set up with Grue, it couldn't possible involve him waking up on his own and checking in during the wee hours of the morning.

Finally Tattletale let her head drop even further, and recited another address. I looked over at Shadow Stalker, and she nodded at me before tossing over the knockout gas. I used it to render Tattletale unconscious-there was nothing I could do to get the venom out of her body, but I could spare her the pain-and walked over to my partner.

"You think it's a trap?" I asked.

"Maybe," Shadow Stalker said, shrugging. "But I'm pretty hard to catch. I'll call you once I've checked it out. Shouldn't take more than twenty minutes to get there."

With that, she jumped off of the roof, transforming into her shadow state and disappearing into the night. I was left alone with three unconscious prisoners. And my thoughts.

ooOoo

By the time the phone rang half an hour later, I had had some time to come to terms with what I had done. It wasn't something I ever wanted to do again, but I had to consider the alternative: if the Undersiders got back out on the street and we continued our back and forth, things could only escalate. Eventually somebody would get seriously hurt or killed. I don't think I could live with myself if I let somebody die just because I had an ethical problem with administering a sting or two. I wasn't exactly thrilled with what had happend, but I could live with it; I would just have to carry it with me and make sure that everything else I did as a cape was worth it.

"I got him!" Shadow Stalker said as soon as I picked up. She sounded almost giddy. "His costume was in the closet."

"Good," I said, with a sigh of relief. I hadn't thought Tattletale was lying at the end there, but you never could be sure with her. I was glad that the night seemed to be drawing to a close.

"He's a hottie, too," Shadow Stalker said, "Why do the villains get all the eye candy? It's fucked up."

I really had no idea what to say to that. I kept silent, hoping she would change the subject.

"Or maybe I just think he's hot because he's a villain," she continued, dashing my hopes. "That would be pretty fucked up too, huh?"

I closed my eyes. Was this friendly banter? Emma and I had been too young to really talk about guys back when we were friends, and all the guys at school were too willing to do Emma and Madison's bidding for me to feel any attraction there. The only guy who had caught my eye lately was the Undersider's friend... I felt a chill run down my spine.

"Is he a black guy, cornrows, pretty built?" I asked, hoping for a no.

"How'd you know?" Shadow Stalker sounded surprised.

"I saw him with one of the Undersiders," I said, before some sense of honesty compelled me to continue. "You're, uh, not fucked up."

"No shit!" She said, then laughed. The thrill of catching Grue had really lightened her mood, she sounded more relaxed than I had ever known her to be. "I was just messing with you. I know a grade A side of beef when I see one."

I fell silent once again. I didn't really know what to say. There were a few kids at school that I got along with ok, the ones that were far from the orbit of the popular crowd, but we didn't... gossip. After a moment of silence I realized I was hearing some kind of thumping noise through the phone, and Shadow Stalker seemed to be breathing heavily.

"What are you doing?" I asked. I wasn't sure I really wanted to know.

"Just dragging the big lug down the stairs," she replied. "There was a big white van parked outside, and boytoy here had a set of keys. I'm thinking this calls for a change of plans."

I liked the old plan. Get the Undersiders together, knock them out, then call in a tip to the PRT. It was simple and safe. I didn't really feel like changing it on the fly. Still, if we were going to work together I couldn't expect to call all the shots, so I decided to hear her out.

ooOoo

The video was middling quality, which is actually pretty good for a surveillance tape. The time stamp on the bottom right corner indicated that the video was taken at three in the morning, and the black and white feed showed a couple of PRT agents standing around, looking at nothing in particular. Suddenly one of them points and shouts, and the two of them are obscured by a cloud of insects.

The insects pull away from the men after only a couple seconds, revealing that they are completely unharmed. They fly away slowly, maintaining their cohesive shape. The camera turns to follow them, and after a second a spotlight highlights the dark cloud of bugs flying high across the street. When they reach the building opposite the PRT headquarters, the group merges into a larger cloud of bugs already blocking the view of the front of the building.

As soon as the spotlight was on the building the bugs all dispersed, almost seeming to vanish as they transitioned from a single mass to a thousand individual bugs. In their place the camera now could see four individuals, dangling down from the top of the building. The camera doesn't show it, but I know that each is secured by a painstakingly crafted harness of spider silk to make sure they don't accidentally fall to their death.

The camera zoomed in, revealing what look like four ordinary teenagers in their pyjamas except for one detail: each one is wearing a mask.

The video was posted to Parahumans Online, and had already elicited a stream of responses.

Bagrat: A friend at the PRT sent me this... somebody delivered the Undersiders to them this morning, all wrapped up like a Christmas present.

CapeWatcher59: That's the Undersiders? Damn, Grue can [content blocked by SafeFilter, to reveal the blocked content please contact your network administrator] under my side any time, if you know what I mean!

Chrome: I think we all know what you mean, CapeWatcher. Please keep the NSFW stuff in the appropriate forum.

TheGnat: Those bugs... could this be that new guy, Skitter?

XxVoid_CowboyxX: Maybe. Damn, the Undersiders picked the wrong guy to fuck with.

The commentary continued in that vein, eventually degenerating into a bunch of posts of that horrible PRT picture of me overlaid with various threatening messages. It was nice to get a little recognition, although it was annoying that ninety percent of the posters seemed to assume I was a guy. I glanced down with annoyance: even if everything else seemed to be going right in my life, one thing had never changed.

That was about all that I could complain about, though. Rounding up an entire criminal gang was a major coup, and also removed a major worry from my mind. I knew we would still have to deal with the ABB and E88 eventually, but the Undersiders were the only ones who had ever been able to track us down, and now they were out of the picture.

Even the fatigue I was feeling couldn't keep the smile off of my face. I had managed to get through the assignment in Mrs. Knott's computer class on sheer willpower, but I could feel my energy reserves running low. Fortunately Mr. Gladly always assigned group work, so I figured I would be able to catch a nap in his class.

In the mean time, there was a lot of interesting content to read on the message board. There actually weren't a ton of posts on the Undersiders' section of the forum before today-other than Hellhound, they had mostly flown under the radar. With their arrest, a flurry of speculative posts started showing up. Mostly they had to do with what was going to happen to the Undersiders now, although Grue's habit of going to sleep in his boxers had apparently earned him quite the fan club.

I was so engrossed in the forum that I didn't notice the end of class approaching, and when the bell rang I was slow to react. By the time I closed out of the computer and stood up, Mrs. Knott had left the room. So had most of my classmates, but a few had lingered behind. Mostly Emma and Sophia's hangers on, and... Emma was walking into the classroom herself. I don't know if she was here to use a computer or what, but once she saw me heading for the exit I knew there was no way I was getting out of the room without some kind of confrontation.

"Taylor, you really need to start taking better care of yourself," Emma said, in that fake friendly voice that she had perfected over the last couple of years. "Bags under your eyes at fifteen? That's not good. It's not like you have the looks that would let you get away with letting the little things slide."

I didn't say anything. If she wanted to take shots at my appearance, it wasn't anything I hadn't noticed about myself. It wasn't exactly nice to hear it from somebody else, but after hearing it for a year and a half it had lost a lot of its sting.

"But you look so cheerful..." Emma said, putting a finger to her chin as if in thought. "Is it true, you were up all night trying to... win the hearts of the football team? All at once?"

"That's pretty rich, coming from the girl who sneaks off under the bleachers with Mark Jansen in fifth period every day."

She was staring at me in shock, and it took a second to realize that I had said that out loud. I must have been more tired than I had thought.

I had been in the habit of tagging my three primary bullies with bugs to keep track of where they were at school for a while. It wasn't a perfect defense-sometimes classes dictated that we would be close to each other, sometimes they would leave my range, sometimes I would forget to note their positions-but it did help me keep from wandering into their sights any more than strictly necessary. It also had kept me more clued in on Emma's social life than I had really wanted to be.

"How do you-why would you even think that?" Emma hissed, displaying actual anger towards me for the first time in a while. Usually she just wore a kind of bored, superior smirk.

I thought about apologizing, but it was too late for that. I turned my thoughts instead to Shadow Stalker, the way that she would brazen her way through every situation, no matter how outmatched she seemed to be. I squared my shoulders and stood up straight, looking Emma in the eye as I spoke.

"Everybody knows. You think I'm the first person to hear anything?" I said, then forced myself to smile. "You should be thanking me for telling you what everybody's thinking."

"What makes you think you can talk to me like that?" Emma asked. "If you don't shut up and mind your own business-"

"You'll what, stuff me in a locker full of used tampons?" I asked, shaking my head. "The problem with running at maximum bitch all the time is that you don't leave yourself much room for escalation."

The girls around us started whispering furiously back and forth to each other. Emma rounded on her friends, realizing for the first time that the audience might not be entirely on her side. Not that any of her friends liked me, but I'm sure they wouldn't mind taking her spot as the queen bee of Winslow. I was sure that Emma would eventually turn things back in her favor-she always did-but for now she was on the back foot. I walked around her and made my way to the door, only to come face to face with Sophia.

She had to have heard the whole thing, but she didn't seem mad. She almost looked thoughtful as she studied my face for a moment, then nodded at me and stepped out of the way. I walked cautiously out the door, waiting for an attack in the back that never came.

That was odd. If this were an after school special I would say Sophia had some kind of newfound respect for me after I stood up for myself, but after almost two full years at Winslow High I knew better than that. The three of them had already shown the willingness to play the long game and manipulate my feelings just so that future bullying would hit me even harder. Sophia's behavior could be part of some new scheme. At best she was engaged in some kind of alpha girl battle with Emma and appreciated an assist no matter what its source.

I put my head down on the desk almost as soon as I entered Mr. Gladly's classroom. I wasn't much for figuring out high school politics when I was fully rested; there was no way I could puzzle out Sophia's motivations while I was dead on my feet. Mr. Gladly was just starting some kind of lecture about capes as I drifted off to sleep.

ooOoo

Colin snapped his hand open as soon as he saw the electricity start to move in the wrong direction, but his reflexes weren't up to the task of outrunning lightning. The clatter of his weapon hitting the floor provided accompaniment to the muttered string of curses that escaped his lips as he tried to shake some feeling back into his hand.

He would count this attempt at integrating his bug zapper mark four into his halberd as a partial success. It generated an electrical field that would certainly kill any flying insects within its area of effect. When the zapper worked on its own, that was enough. The problem was that when it was added to his halberd, all of that electricity wanted to arc back to the closest thing to a lightning rod in the general vicinity.

Maybe the best solution was to incorporate insulation for his hands into his costume. Then the bug zapper could double as anti-theft technology.

The primary purpose, of course, was to protect himself against Skitter. If he ran into the young parahuman again, he would of course attempt to recruit him into the Wards. That was standard procedure for good reason: they needed all the capes they could get. But after the aggression and hostility Skitter had shown in their first meeting, it was only prudent to prepare to defend himself in case things went south.

A beeping noise from the wall distracted Colin from his train of thought, and he glanced up at the clock in surprise. It was already time to start getting ready for the morning's interrogation. He set aside the disassembled components of his gear before donning the "dress uniform" he used for those occasions that required Armsmaster to make an appearance inside the Protectorate Headquarters.

Every cape had a type of opponent that they hated to face. Some hated fighting movers, finding it impossible to lay a glove on them. Some hated the way brutes could smash their way through the obstacles in their path. Some-villains in particular-hated running up against tinkers.

Colin liked to think he had something to do with that, but he knew in reality it probably had more to do with the fact that the Protectorate did a good job recruiting unaffiliated tinkers into their ranks and supporting their research. As a result, the good guys tended to hit the streets with a noticeable technological edge. The sheer versatility of the solutions a good tinker could provide was difficult for anybody to handle.

Colin hated dealing with thinkers. Other types of powers, he could figure out how to beat. It was just a matter of putting in the time, working through the glitches inherent in any new piece of equipment until it was ready to neutralize his opponent's advantage. Adapting his combat analysis software to handle novel types of movement powers, modifying his halberd to defeat new defensive powers. Colin enjoyed it: tinkering with his tools in a constant process of refinement and improvement provided a sort of pure satisfaction and fulfillment that was all too hard to come by in performing the rest of his duties.

To have a thinker eyeball his latest trick and figure out a way around it in three seconds flat was incredibly frustrating. Forty hours in the lab turned into nothing more than a momentary one-time advantage on the streets.

The really frustrating part was that he knew he was smarter than most of them, on a power-neutral basis. He had his test scores from before he had triggered, and they compared favorably with the test scores from the thinkers the Protectorate had complete files on. To be effortlessly defeated in his one field of strength solely because some cosmic fluke had given his opponent the right superpower, it felt-well, probably how a dedicated bodybuilder felt when he found himself crosswise to the wrong brute, or how scientists felt when they tried to analyze tinker technology.

Colin tried not to let his frustrations with thinkers affect his professional interactions, but there was no denying that it sometimes made it easier to play his role in good cape, bad cape style interrogations.

Once he was properly attired, Armsmaster made his way to the observation room. He ran into Director Piggot in the elevator, and the two shared a nod of greeting. The director didn't believe in small talk, which was one of the little things that made for a smooth working relationship between the two of them.

The observation room was a mirror image of the attached interrogation room. Bare concrete walls set off a cheap conference table and chairs, all illuminated by flourescent lights that were recessed into the tile ceiling. The only difference was the alignment of the one way mirror and the controls for the intercom system that allowed them to call in questions or instructions if necessary.

Armsmaster and the director hadn't been waiting for more than a minute when the door opened and Tattletale was led into the interrogation room. What struck Armsmaster, as it so often did, was just how young she looked. She looked like a perfectly ordinary student at Arcadia High. Nothing about her appearance marked her as a member of one of the more elusive gangs in the Brockton Bay underworld-which might help explain their elusiveness. She sauntered into the room like an honored guest, apparently untroubled by the handcuffs on her arms.

Sitting opposite her was one of the obviously ex-military men that the PRT tended to attract to its ranks. Looming over his side of the table, he was directing a stern glare in her direction that seemed to have very little effect. In fact, Armsmaster realized, she hadn't even looked at her interrogator. Ever since she walked into the room, her eyes had been fixed on the one way mirror, looking directly at the spot where Director Piggot was standing.

"Lisa Wilbourn," the interrogator said, "or do you prefer Sarah Livsey?"

Tattletale seemed unfazed by the casual display of knowledge about her life.

"Let's stick with Lisa," Tattletale-or Lisa, Armsmaster thought, considering the context of the conversation-replied, apparently unconcerned by the casual display of knowledge of her personal background. "I spent a lot of money setting up that identity, it would be a shame to let it go to waste."

She turned to look at the interrogator directly for the first time. "And what about you? Do you prefer gopher or flunky?"

"Neither," the PRT officer replied, obviously unamused.

"Well, if you work hard and get promoted, maybe someday I'll care about your preferences," Lisa said. "In the meantime, why don't you stop wasting my time and go get Director Piggot in here?"

"I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation," he replied, leaning over the table as some anger started to color his voice. "You could be looking at serious jail time for the things that you've done."

"If this is going to be that kind of conversation," Lisa said, unmoved by the threat, "I think I'd like to have it with my lawyer present."

The PRT officer nodded, then stood and walked to the exit. Opening the door, he spoke briefly to the guard waiting on the other side, then returned with a cell phone that he placed on the table. He uncuffed Lisa's right hand, securing the empty cuff to the leg of the table.

Lisa would have been well within her rights to demand privacy for her phone call, but she seemed completely oblivious to their scrutiny as she dialed a number from memory and perched the phone between her shoulder and her ear.

"Hey Quinn... of course it's me, don't you watch the news? For what I pay you, you ought to be here already," Lisa said, her tone of voice making it clear that she wasn't actually upset. "Just get down here. They'll be expecting you."

Director Piggot reacted when she heard Lisa address her lawyer by name. "Quinn Calle... if she can afford his services, the Undersiders may have been more prolific than we realized.

Armsmaster thought back to the last major thinker villain they had taken down in Brockton Bay. It had been shortly before the director had transferred to her current posting.

"Or she came to some kind of arrangement," he said. "A law firm can get a lot out of one hour of a thinker's time."

The director nodded to acknowledge the point, and the two of them settled in to wait. They didn't have to wait long. However Lisa was paying her legal bills, it was clear that she was a high priority client. Quinn came bustling into the room not ten minutes after Lisa had hung up the phone, and after a short meeting with his client he managed to finagle his way into the observation room.

"I have to admit," Quinn said, flashing that annoyingly confident smile that Armsmaster had come to know all to well from his run-ins with the man, "I'm curious how my client went from sleeping in her bed to PRT custody without any kind of warrant being issued."

"She came to us, in a way," Armsmaster replied. "You've seen the video, I assume."

"And the series of events leading from her sleeping at home to her being dangled from the roof of a building were orchestrated by purely private action, I'm sure," Quinn said, skepticism clear in his voice. "It would be fun to see you try to make that hold up under Toymaker."

Armsmaster had to fight to suppress a grimace. Toymaker v. New York was the landmark case that laid out the standard for when the acts of a costumed vigilante could be considered state action. Since the average vigilante had little appreciation for fine points of law, dealing with Toymaker issues tended to be an incredibly frustrating part of Armsmaster's job. It was only compounded by the fact that instructing local vigilantes in the intricacies of the law was exactly the kind of thing that, under Toymaker, tended to make courts treat the vigilantes as an extension of the Protectorate.

The way the legal system turned victories for the good guys into defeats almost seemed designed to create frustration. Armsmaster knew he wasn't the only tinker who had developed lie-detecting technology, and to be forced to let people go who he knew were guilty just because the courts hadn't deemed such technology to be trustworthy... sometimes it made him question why he was doing what he was doing. He tried to focus on the fact that adhering to that kind of asinine technicality was what separated the Protectorate from any other gang. They weren't just the strongest group of capes around: they were dedicated to upholding the rule of law.

Quinn had paused to see the reaction to his little dig, but he had more to say. "Unfortunately for me, but fortunately for you, my client has seen the light. She wants nothing more to do with a life of crime, and she's willing to join the Wards program."

"You must be joking."

Director Piggot spoke for the two of them. Quinn looked a little taken aback by the flat refusal.

"Not at all," he replied. "And don't tell me you've never done this sort of thing before. I know you're always in need of more thinkers-"

"Not one with a murder on her record," Piggot replied.

"Murder?" Quinn asked, blinking in surprise. "Ah, I think I understand. The brother, right?"

Director Piggot nodded.

"So, let me tell the story: two children, one the apple of his parents' eye while the other can't do anything right. Driven by jealousy, she uses her spooky powers," Quinn said, pausing to wiggle his fingers dramatically, "to drive him to kill himself. Looks like a suicide, but actually it's murder most foul. Does that about sum it up?"

Director Piggot nodded once more.

"I can see how to local yokels down in the precinct could come up with that one," Quinn said, shaking his head, "but I expected better of the Protectorate. Come on, what's missing in that story?"

Armsmaster felt like slapping his forehead when the penny dropped. "The trigger."

"Exactly!" Quinn exclaimed. "If sibling jealousy were enough to trigger superpowers we'd be drowning in capes. Isn't it more likely that the traumatic death of her brother caused her to trigger? And once she had her power she knew beyond a doubt that her parents blamed her for what happened. Is it any surprise that somebody in that kind of situation would run away and fall in with a bad crowd?"

Director Piggot turned to Armsmaster. "You buying any of this?"

The subtext of the question, of course, was what his lie detection suite was saying.

"I believe that he believes it," Armsmaster replied, then gestured towards the interrogation room, where Lisa was sitting by herself at the table. "I also believe that she can be quite convincing."

The simple fact was that all the lie detection technology in the world was no use when the subject didn't know he was lying.

"A claim like this changes the whole situation," Director Piggot said, then sighed. "I'm going to have to hear it from the girl herself. Armsmaster, I'm delegating the final authority on the disposition of this case to you."

Armsmaster nodded. Standard procedure when a stranger or a thinker was involved was for the person with decisionmaking authority not to enter the room with the subject. If it became unavoidable, the authority would be delegated to another.

Quinn simply waved Director Piggot on as she headed out. Usually a lawyer wouldn't want his client talking to law enforcement without being present, but having a thinker involved changed the whole complexion of the situation.

"Tell me how you triggered."

The director didn't waste any time asking the question as she walked in the door. Lisa looked up, startled. For the first time since she entered the room, she didn't look completely comfortable.

"I guess this was bound to come up eventually," she said, turning back to look down at the table. "It started when my brother killed himself."

Partly true. Before Armsmaster could move to signal Director Piggot, Lisa continued.

"That wasn't when I triggered exactly, though," she said. "It was the nightmares afterward that kind of drove things home. I knew his life wasn't perfect, you know? Saw some of the little things that were screwed up. But I never put it together. I just couldn't get over it-why couldn't I figure things out? And then it got so I could figure things out, but it didn't really help anything at all."

That had the ring of truth about it, both to Armsmaster's ear and to the analytic software in his helmet. He brought his hands together behind his back and tapped his right index finger on his left wrist. It transmitted a signal to a patch the director wore on her lower back, causing it to vibrate once.

Director Piggot had paused, both to allow Lisa time to gather herself and to wait for Armsmaster's signal. When she received confirmation of Lisa's story, she spoke again.

"Thank you for sharing; I know it is a difficult subject," she said, then paused. "If you are serious about wanting to join the Wards, we will need an explanation of just what your power is."

"Right," Lisa said, straightening up, "I know things."

When Director Piggot didn't respond other than raising an eyebrow, Lisa continued.

"Not everything. It's more like a kind of super-intuition. Like, total bullshit Sherlock Holmes kind of stuff," Lisa said, then took a long look at the director. "Let's start with the easy stuff: you're left handed, ex-military, unmarried, no kids. You have two cats, and your computer passwords alternate between the cats' names followed by random digits. Three or four digits? Ah, your parents' birthdays. You have a condition that requires the use of a dialysis machine, which you don't use as directed, probably because-"

"Enough!" Director Piggot interrupted. "That is quite sufficient, if not a little alarming. How do we know you're not just orchestrating this conversation to your own benefit with a power like that?"

"It doesn't work like that," Lisa protested. "I get facts, not instructions. I mean, I can tell you don't like me-no, that's not it, you don't like capes in general? Wow, that's pretty fucked up."

A silence fell over the room. Back in the observation area, it was all Armsmaster could do to remain impassive in the face of twin revelations of what a useful power had fallen into their laps and the director's apparent prejudice. Quinn Calle was openly gaping at the two women.

"One fact you or your power left out was that I was on the first team sent in to investigate Nilbog," Director Piggot said, her voice flat. "So yes, I have a healthy appreciation of the dangers of power falling into the wrong hands. I also dislike the erosion of civil society caused by all of the violence inherent in parahuman combat. But I am perfectly capable of judging each particular parahuman as an individual."

Armsmaster relaxed a little when his software confirmed that the director was telling the truth. He counted it as a victory that he managed not to sigh in relief in front of the defense attorney.

"My power is like that," Lisa said. "I can make some pretty ridiculous inferences, but I can't just pull facts out of nowhere."

A silence fell over the interrogation room once more, but this time it was much less fraught. Armsmaster briefly weighed his options before turning to address Calle.

"She'll have to allocute. We'll recommend probation. If she's a Ward in good standing on her eighteenth birthday, she gets a clean slate," Armsmaster said. "Any crimes turn up that she didn't mention, any disciplinary actions that result in her dismissal from the team, and she goes straight to juvenile detention."

"That's about what we expected," Quinn replied. "Do you guys have some kind of standard form or do you want me to draft something?"

"There is one other thing," Armsmaster said. "Our understanding is that the Undersiders were working for someone. We'll need anything she knows about who that person is."

Quinn gestured toward the window. "I'm sure she won't mind sharing. Would you like me to go ahead and ask?"

Armsmaster nodded, and keyed on the intercom. Quinn leaned forward to speak clearly into the microphone.

"Lisa, dear, we've just about finalized a deal," he said. "Is there anything you can tell us about the man calling the shots for the Undersiders?"

She giggled, which was not the response Armsmaster was expecting.

"The others talked about that, huh?" She asked, looking at Director Piggot and receiving a nod. "They talked to 'Mr. Big' on the phone once or twice, and I was the only one who met him in person, right?"

Director Piggot nodded once more.

"And after that initial contact I was the only one who ever interacted with the boss, and nobody else had any idea who he was..." Lisa said. "You see where I'm going with this?"

"There was no 'Mr. Big'?" Director Piggot said, echoing Armsmaster's line of thought. "But why?"

"You think Grue would take orders from a skinny little white girl? Or that Bitch would listen to a thinker who couldn't stand up to her dogs even before she pumped them up?" Lisa asked, shaking her head. "But have them talk to a scary voice on the phone, put the idea of some mastermind behind everything in their head, and they fall right in line."

"This isn't the kind of conversation that makes me think you'd be a good fit in law enforcement," the director commented.

"Like you could turn down a thinker like me," Lisa said, flashing a grin. "It's not like we ever did anything that bad, we just had big dreams."

Those last two comments, at least, registered as completely true, which Armsmaster found only a little reassuring.

"And this whole thing isn't part of some master plan to infiltrate the Wards?" Director Piggot asked.

"If I could plan that far ahead, we wouldn't even be having this conversation," Lisa said, which registered as true. "On the other hand, if I didn't have a backup plan for leaving my old life behind, they'd make me turn in my thinker rating."

She smiled after making that last comment, the first really full, open smile Armsmaster had seen since she walked into the room. Something about it made him wonder, just for a moment, if he would be letting a fox in the henhouse by admitting her to the Wards.

At least as a Ward she would definitely be transferred to another city and become somebody else's problem.

ooOoo

AN: Time for Operation: Cannot Possibly Fail...


End file.
